


No More Revengeance

by DaFinchy



Category: Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (Video Games), No More Heroes (Video Games)
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-12-24
Updated: 2018-04-26
Packaged: 2018-09-11 18:20:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 17
Words: 33,919
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9001429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DaFinchy/pseuds/DaFinchy
Summary: It's a crossover between No More Heroes and Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance. It had to be done. I don't apologize.





	1. Jerry Preacher... *guitar sting*

**Chapter One**  
_Jerry Preacher... *guitar sting*_

Mr. Valdez was a hard bastard. His father was a hard bastard, his grandfather was a hard bastard, his six brothers were hard bastards, and they all made each other hard bastards by beating the crap out of each other. He dropped out of school, because it was _not_ filled with hard bastards, and with his lack of education he gravitated to where all hard bastards gravitated to: those places where other hard bastards hung out at. There, he learned everything he needed to know. He learned who to punch, who not to punch, and who could give him a job standing in front of a door threatening people with punches if they didn't stop looking like they were hard bastards. But the one thing they never taught him was how to respond when the dumbest thing he'd ever seen in his short, angry life came walking up to the door he was guarding.

  
Mr. Valdez could only guess that the man was trying to pose as a tourist. That's what he would have assumed, going by the loud blue Hawaiian shirt, the board shorts, the "I'm someone's dumpy, unfuckable uncle on vacation" shades and the inexplicable smattering of zinc painting his nose white. He could only assume that, because the man stomping up to the door was otherwise a cyborg. Like, there wasn't any pussy footing around it, the man was a fucking cyborg. He was chromed up head to toe, covered in silvery artificial skin that was less about looking human and more to give the collection of muscle fibers that formed his body some kind of cohesive structure. The man had a chin like a villain out of a shitty secret agent movie or, like, the bastard lovechild of a bulldog and a backhoe. _For fuck's sake,_ Mr. Valdez thought to himself, beneath his impassable hard bastard expression, _this guy's packing claws on the end of his fingers! Who the fuck's he think he's fooling?_

  
Still, Mr. Valdez was in a mood, and was half looking for an excuse to add "once punched out a cyborg" to his violence resume, so he decided to let the oddity come up and do its bit. The cyborg, clearly unfazed by Mr. Valdez's folded arms and "don't fuck with me" stance, gave him a wave and a smile that would have said "I am the exact opposite of a hard bastard" if it had been delivered by any other chin. "Why, hello there," the cyborg said, with what had to be the worst attempt at a Midwest accent that anybody would ever have to endure. "I was hopin' yoo could direct me to that there bathroom. I've been on a bus for the last coupla hours with nothin' but a bottle-a Moose Jaw Juice, and lemme tell ya, she makes for some needy company, if ya know what I mean."

  
"No bathroom here." Mr. Valdez responded, with the stony glare that all the hard bastards taught him. "Unless you wanna piss on a wall."

  
The cyborg seemed genuinely taken aback at being so thoroughly shut down, but he recovered quickly enough, back to goofy grins and bad accents. "Say, uh, I don't suppose you could tell me what yer guardin' over here, could ya?" He waved a hand at the building behind Mr. Valdez, nearly scraping a claw against his nose in the process. "Looks like a pretty happenin' party spot, don'tcha know."

  
"Private club," Mr. Valdez gruffed. "Members only."

  
The cyborg made an exaggerated "oh, pshaw" motion. "Members only? Now that sounds like a challenge if ever there was one. Lemme talk to your boss; I'm sure he'll let me in faster'n milk freezes on a Wisconsin winter night."

  
"Not gonna happen."

  
"Aw, now don't be like that..."

  
"Not." Mr Valdez puffed out his chest. "Gonna." He popped a kink out of his neck. "Happen."

  
"Well, why not?" the cyborg huffed, dropping his accent as he put on what could only be described as a childish cyborg pout.

  
Mr. Valdez reached into his pocket, slipped the brass knuckles around his fingers, and flexed them tight into a fist. "Because, sir, you are obviously a cyborg coming to kill the fiftieth top ranked assassin, and I'm under orders to make sure anybody who tries to pull that shit leaves with half their face missing."

  
The cyborg put one hand up in surrender (it was at this point Mr. Valdez's "hard bastard" training made him notice that the cyborg's other hand had been down at his side the whole time, for some reason). "Woah, now, there buddy," he said, suddenly back to his affected voice. "You're barking up the wrong tree, there, now, don't you know... um, there... you... y'all... umm..." There was a silence that hung in the air, thick and awkward as the closet six and a half minutes into a childhood game of seven minutes in heaven, which the cyborg eventually broke with two words:

  
"Thunder Strike."

  
Before Mr. Valdez could remove his knuckled fist from his pocket, a palm was practically touching his nose. The rest was kind of a chaotic blur. He remembered a concussive force, like a bomb had gone off in front of his face. He remembered his head smacking against the door. He remembered a bizarrely heeled foot in his solar plexus, being propelled by what looked like rockets as it pushed him through the door and into the club, where he finally came to rest against the bar. And he remembered the cyborg, hanging in mid air, suspended by his foot which was currently digging into Mr. Valdez's body. He thought he heard the cyborg say something before the pain finally overtook him, some bullshit like "I have to give you credit. Not everyone could see through my disguises. Only a professional could sniff out a master of infiltration like myself." Of course, then he stopped remembering things, because the bar gave out and he was blasted headlong into the wall, where he died.

  
The cyborg kicked off of Mr. Valdez's body just as the bar collapsed, pulling a backflip and landing with the sort of bullshit three point cat like grace that marks someone way too inclined to showing off. The collection of hard bastards that had been drinking and chatting in the room were not terribly impressed, or at least not impressed enough to forget to pick up their pipes, bats, and knives and surround the intruder.

  
"Guess there's no point in maintaining the act any longer," the cyborg said, his voice gaining the faintest hint of a "hard bastard" gravel. He removed his right hand from its place at his side, holding it up to the growing mob with his palm down and his fingers seemingly curled aorund something. At that point, the cloaking device disengaged, revealing the long, silver briefcase he'd been holding, which popped open from the bottom and dispensed an overly elaborate looking red bladed katana. With a kick to keep it up in the air, he grabbed it in his other hand, tossed the briefcase to land on Mr. Valdez's mangled corpse, and took an appropriately menacing looking stance. "It's game time!"


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter Two**   
_Rules of Nature_

  
Being a thug was a generally easy life. Unlike the military, they didn't ask you to go to PT or weapons training or generally expect you to focus any attention to getting "good" at fighting. They also didn't kick you out for being a violent jackass with as much respect for authority as high school diplomas. Of course, that tended to bite one in the ass when somebody came along who actually knew what they were doing, but it wasn't until about now that they really had cause to think about that.

  
Jimmy was the first to try his luck, him and his favorite lead pipe. He always said he'd trust Little Pipey Longstockings more than a sword or a gimmicky beam katana any day of the week; given what the others heard from him at practically every opportunity, his strategy for dealing with Touchdown was self-aggrandizing and borderline fetishistic in its overtones. It's too bad in practice his great pipe strategy seemed to be forgotten in the rush for violence, and he settled instead for some gangling overhead jumping chop. A child could have seen that coming; the cyborg slapping it aside with his sword, kicking Jimmy up in the air, spinning like a top and turning his blade into a Cuisinart and Jimmy's body into the fruit post-smoothie was just showboating on top of all of that.

  
Darnell didn't see that until it was just a mite too late to reconsider his strategy of trying to rush the cyborg with a switchblade. He could have sworn that it wouldn't have mattered anyway, since he caught the guy on the end of his little combat twirl and had the knife aimed right for the guy's robo-kidneys. Unfortunately for Darnell, the split-second that the cyborg regained his footing, he kicked off the floor and was about a foot and a half too far to the left for anything other than a light graze. Doubly unfortunate was the fact that what took the cyborg's place in front of the thug was that sword of his. Darnell would never know what went wrong.

  
Bill, Jed, and "Minuteman" McGinty tried to improve their odds by surrounding the cyborg and attacking more or less in unison. They swung at him with pipes and bats (McGinty liked to take one of each because he thought going akimbo was "cool"), but they quickly learned that the kind of person who goes into battle with a blood red katana might know how to use it. The cyborg sketched a pattern in the air of strikes against their various weapons, knocking them aside one by one and taking bits of them off in the process. The three could only follow the sword blade, hoping to see the counterattack coming. What they didn't notice was that the hilt of that sword left the cyborg's hand, hung in the air for a second, and then found a home inexplicably nestled in the arch between the ball of his right foot and his impractically tall heel. Jed got it first, when the cyborg lashed out with his foot-mounted sword. Bill got it next when the cyborg retracted his leg, pivoted and extended in a thrust. McGinty tried to get his two weapons up in defense (a perfectly "cool" defense, one might add) as the cyborg lifted his leg up to axe-kick down, but the pipe, the bat and even McGinty proved to be less than stellar at holding together as the blade came crashing down.

  
This just left Nils, the fat one, hanging in the back and only just now managing to get to his feet. He saw his friends being reduced to various proportions of quivering cold cuts, and the cyborg vacationer in the middle of it all, saw the blood stuck to his "I'm somebody's dumpy, unfuckable uncle" shades, and knew immediately what had to be done.

  
"Yo, screw this!" Nils shouted, as he made a beeline for the door. "Touchdown ain't worth this shit; I'm out!"

  
The cyborg watched Nils leave, as he tossed the sword back into his hand, wiped the blood off between the bicep and forearm of his other arm, and turned around to reach into the suitcase that had slipped off Mr. Valdez's still twitching corpse. As he fished around for the scabbard, he heard a familiar sound rattling the small bones of his ear. _Chirrup, chirrup!_ Distractedly, he touched a finger to his earlobe. "Bladewolf," he said, "what's your location?"

  
A blue holographic display sprung to life in the air just to the cyborg's right, on which a robotic dog sat staring, his bizarre tentacle-tail swishing back and forth in the background. "Raiden," it said, the red panel where its eyes should be glowing with every syllable, "I am currently ten kilometers from the city limits."

  
"Should've let me pick you up," Raiden replied, as he started to attach the scabbard to his back. "We would have gotten in together."

  
"Negative. This is more efficient." Bladewolf snapped to attention for a second, as though something on his end caught his eye, before looking back to the screen. "Based on your current state, I can only surmise you went to the target without me."

 

"Yeah. So far, I'm not seeing a lot of our tech around. These guys aren't fitted with CNT muscle fiber."

  
"SOP?"

  
"Possibly. I mean, something's up with these guys, charging a cyborg head on. They're probably on fear suppressing nanomachines."

  
"That would be a logical possibility." Bladewolf started to move as he spoke, though the feed remained fixed on him. "Other possibilities include mental derangement, suicidal tendencies, or ignorance about the abilities that cyborgs possess."

  
Raiden grunted in understanding, as he scanned around for where to go next. "Guess there's no point in theorizing now. I'll have to look into this more once I find Preacher."

  
"Proceed with caution," Bladewolf warned. "Unaugmented humans are of a negligible risk level, but their leader is believed to have been given cybernetic enhancement."

  
"Don't worry, I'll be careful. Say, while I have you, I wanna ask you something. Does the word 'Touchdown' mean anything to you, in relation to this UAA business?"

  
"I only know of that word in regards to the landing of aircraft, or to the primary method of scoring in American football."

  
"Right. Just checking. Get over here as soon as you can, so we can figure this out."

  
"Understood." Bladewolf's walk changed to a loping run and, being a robot, this in no way impacted the way his eye panel flashed. "I am currently coming up on a location the locals call an 'Akashic Point.' It seems to be significant as a tourist destination."

  
Raiden found what he was looking for, a stairway up to the head office. "Well, don't get too wrapped up in sight-seeing. See you when you get here."

  
_Pree-ooh..._ The feed shut down, and Raiden removed his finger from his ear just as he came up on the door. It seemed to be locked. Not just locked, in fact; where there would normally be a doorknob, there seemed to be a place where one might put something like an odd engraving of some kind. Raiden carefully thought this new development over, before just bringing his sword up and hacking the door to pieces.


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter Three**   
_N.M.H._

  
Happily, Nils learned he didn't have to go far to find another group of UAA thugs. He only had to follow a passing nondescript sedan to a nearby warehouse and Bob's your uncle, there they were. Out of breath, he explained the situation, and in short order he and about ten or so besuited professionals were back to the bar at a brisk jog, guns and pipes drawn. "Holy shit..." one of the smaller guys, Gomez, whistled while he looked over the remains of the front door. "Yo, Nils. Touchdown do this shit?"

  
"Nah, man," Nils wheezed. "It was some other guy. Cyborg. White hair. Hawaiian shirt."

  
"Well, shit," Jake said, with the sort of chuckle that came with completely failing to grasp the situation. "Now I've heard everything."

  
Nils stooped over for a second to catch his breath, unaware of the sound of sneakers scuffing along behind him.

  
Petey the Perch did what Petey the Perch always does in these kinds of situations; he tried to take charge. "All right, guys. We do this clean and quick. Rush the place, find this guy, and hit 'em 'til he stops twtiching. Gomez, Rick, get those safeties off."

  
Gomez laughed, pointing his gun at everybody's face with lazy swings of the arm. "Like I ever had it on?"

  
Nils's pulse finally started to cease it's pounding in his ears, which meant he could finally hear that weird, insistent electric buzzing that was slowly getting louder. _That sound,_ he thought to himself, _where have I heard that noise before?_

  
Petey, meanwhile, continued rattling off useless orders. "Jake and I'll hit the guy. Nils? You try and get around him. We'll try and keep a shot clear for Rick and Gomez, and..." And then, suddenly, the group heard something from Petey they never really had a chance to hear. They heard him stop, bemused.

  
"What's up?" Nils asked, thinking that Petey was staring at him with that look of "Oh, shit..." When he was able to put it together that that wasn't the case, he finally realized that the buzzing noise and the footsteps were right behind him. He turned around.

  
Nils recognized a lot of things on the man who stared up at him. He recognized the shitty red jacket. He recognized the gelled up, spiky black hair. He recognized the throwback eighties shades, the torn up jeans, the black shirt with the words "Bad Girl" stenciled on like it meant something. The man stared, seemingly beyond Nils, with the sort of look Nils had only seen on angry assassins leaning on people for the money they were owed.

  
"Hey, guys," he said, with clearly manufactured casualness. "There a party going on, over here?"

  
Nils began to shout "It's fucking Touchdown!" Unfortunately for him, he only managed to get about four and a half syllables in before a blue light cut from left to right in front of him, taking with it the top part of his head. The man apparently known as Touchdown rested the filament of his glowing blue beam katana against his shoulder, taking in his view of the rest of the UAA thugs as Nils' heavy body sank to the concrete in a heap.

  
Gomez had bullets out in the air before he even really bothered trying to aim the damn gun. Touchdown managed to get his sword up in time, feeling the impact as the bullets mostly evaporated on contact with super heated photon energy (or plasma, or unobtanium or whatever the fuck made his katana so hot) and deflected off the rest. Jake jumped in with his laser brass knuckles, swinging hard for those faux-retro shades. Touchdown caught the attack with his sword and, through a sheer display of force, pushed the attack back, throwing Rick off balance. A swipe from right to left greeted him as he caught his footing, so deep that it caught under both his and Rick's necks, taking their heads.

  
And then Touchdown was on the move. Petey could hardly get his cheap, mall brand katana up before Touchdown was tearing into him with a left swipe, a diagonal right swipe, and then the sort of vaulting overhead chop that, unlike certain pipe wielding assassins, this guy had the raw physicality to pull off with enough strength to leave Petey clean in halves.

  
And with that, Gomez was left. Touchdown pulled himself up from his carnage, took one look at the door, and then to the now terrified assassin. "One of you guys did this?"

  
"N-n-no, sir, Mr. Crownless King, sir," Gomez warbled, holding his gun up with zero regard for where his finger was on the trigger. "Nils said it was some cyborg."

  
"Cyborg?"

  
"Yeah. Said he busted in and started cutting up the place."

  
Touchdown pursed his lips, stared off to the side, rocked back on his feet in barely contained frustration, and then with a mighty "Fuck!" cut Gomez from navel to neck, walking past the spray of blood to storm into the bar. "Fuck," he repeated, and then many times in sequence as he stepped over bodies, one for every stomping, petulant step onto the blood-soaked carpets. "Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck... fucking fuck!"  
He saw a door, cut to splinters, and immediately began to barrel through it. "Preacher! Preacher, you'd better not be dead. Do you hear me?"

  
*** * ***

Nick and Dick, meanwhile, stood guard by the old dance floor further into the club. In a manner of speaking, they were standing guard. The fact is, they were both just a little bit tipsy on designer drinks and weren't really all that suited to the whole guard thing, the way they kept their backs to the only entrance to the room and spent most of their time shooting the shit.

  
"Hey, Dick," said Nick.

  
"Yeah, Nick," said Dick.

  
"Did you hear something?"

  
"What? Like what?"

  
"I dunno, like the sound of all our friends being brutally murdered in the next room."

  
"Man, you're hearing things." Dick went behind the bar and started futzing around with bottles of expensive liquor. "The only guy we're expecting to come in is Touchdown, and we'd have heard him coming a county away."

  
"Yeah, but... shouldn't we, you know, go see if everyone's all right?"

  
It was around this time that a red katana lanced through Nick from above, attached to the foot of the cyborg. Dick didn't hear, as he pulled up some French sounding vodka, which seemed to him to be a hilarious contradiction of terms and the definition of irony, insofar as he understood what irony was. "You know, you worry too much." As he poured himself a glass, he didn't hear the horrible sounds of Nick being lifted into the air and mercilessly being torn apart by the lightning fast slashes of a killer ninja cyborg. He didn't even notice the splash-back when body parts started littering the bar behind him. "What, you think we're under attack by ninjas, or something? Lemme tell you something. I've been doing this thug thing for six months, now. I've seen everything there is to see." He took a pull of the vodka, finding it ironically delicious, so much so, he failed to notice the cyborg clambering over the bar towards him with murder in his cybernetic eyes. "And there ain't nothing that I can't handle, okay?" He laughed, a very ironic laugh.

  
And that was when he noticed the katana sticking out of his chest. As it pulled out of him, and he dropped to his knees, mere moments before he was hacked unceremoniously to ribbons, he remembered thinking to himself _you know, there's a word that describes this very situation I'm in, but for the life of me, I can't remember what it is._

  
Raiden wiped more blood from his sword, as he looked around the dance floor. "Preacher?" he called out. "Preacher, come out here!"

  
A voice called out from the stairs leading up to the DJ booth, deep and brassy. "That... ain't the voice I was expectin' to hear today." A man lumbered down the stairs, awkward as though he wasn't fully used to the way legs worked. He was a black man, slightly older than the crowd of men Raiden had just gotten done with, with his hands in his pocket and his face mostly obscured by the hood of his purple sweater. "So, what do you want? I take it you ain't here sight-seein' in that getup."


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter Four**   
_Punch-drunk Preacherman_

  
Raiden reached up to remove his dumb shades, keeping a trained eye on the man who just stepped down the last step to the dance floor. "Jerry Preacher?" he asked, "fiftieth ranked assassin of the United Assassin's Association?"

  
"You got it." Jerry lifted his head just a little bit; Raiden could swear he saw a faint glimmer of something metallic catch the light from under the man's hood for just a second. "And who are you? Sorry, but I was expecting someone else."

  
"Someone else?" Raiden placed the glasses on the bar and reached for a towel, which thankfully had been spared the rain of viscera from Nick and Dick. As the cyborg moved to wipe the zinc from his nose, he decided to take an educated guess on something. "Touchdown?"

  
"Don't play dumb." There was venom in the man's voice. Hatred. The kind of thing that probably would have been perfectly reasonable coming from a professional killer, but which nonetheless made Raiden pay just a little bit more attention. "I should've figured he'd send someone out to do his dirty work. What's wrong, his brother or his ninja girlfriend too busy for me?"

  
"Hate to break it to you..." Raiden put on a show of being casual, even as his eyes worked to get a complete view of the field and of the assassin's stance. "...but nobody sent me."

  
"Right, sure. So, what? Does that make you number fifty-two, then?"

  
"I'm not with the UAA, either. Call me a... free agent." Raiden pointed his sword in Jerry's direction with patently unecessary theatrics. "Your organization has something they shouldn't. Something I intend to get back."

  
"And what would that be?" Jerry asked, with a tone that suggested he really didn't give a shit.

  
"Don't play dumb!" Now it was Raiden's turn to adopt a bit of angry gravel in his voice. "Tell me what the UAA is planning on doing with the program!"

  
Jerry began to laugh. It was a cold, but hearty laugh. He pulled a steel fist out of his pocket and pulled back his hood, revealing a face half covered in chrome and circuitry. "You wanna know what the Association's doing? Shit like this; that's what they're doing."

  
Raiden grunted. "CNT muscle fiber... you're a cyborg?"

  
"Nah," Jerry replied. "Not like you are, anyways. This is just prosthesis. Got 'em over... I think the doctor said like forty percent of my body." He pulled the other hand out of his pocket, also robotic, and folded his arms over his head in clearly manufactured casualness. "Didn't bother askin' why they had this kind of hardware floatin' around their office. I just heard they'd be willin' to give it to me, for a price."

  
"And why would you sign up with assassins for some prosthesis?" Raiden asked.

  
"For a chance at the bastard that cut up my shit in the first place."

  
Raiden decided to take another stab in the dark. "Touchdown."

  
Jerry dropped his arms, reached for the small of his back, and produced a sub-machine gun, which he pointed in the cyborg's direction. "Let's get something straight here, Uncle Robo. I'm only here for that guy. If I gotta kill some punk-ass intruding 'free agent' to get my shot with that psycho, then that's what I'm gonna do."

  
Raiden rolled the kinks out of his shoulder, even though CNT fiber doesn't kink, per se, and it was really more of an unecessary reflex. "Then it seems we're agreed. I want your bosses, so it looks like I've gotta go through you."

  
Jerry spread himself to a stance more conducive to combat, pulling a little remote from his pocket with his free hand and pointing it towards the DJ booth. There was a mechanical thunk as a face mask sprouted from both sides of Raiden's face, slamming together to cover him forehead to upper lip in an opaque shield. They both stood, taking each other's measure.

  
And then the music started.

  
Raiden immediately jumped left, at the same instant Jerry pulled the trigger. He swung his katana in circles around his body, feeling the vibrations as bullets pinged off the blade and went flying in chaotic ricochets around him. He ran around the outside edge of the dance floor, waiting for the tell-tale click of a gun out of bullets, before he cut across and ran towards the assassin. He got about halfway before he saw something flying in from the corner of his eye. Somebody hidden away had tossed Jerry an identical second gun. Raiden just barely managed to get his sword swinging around again fast enough to block the next hail of bullets that came immediately once Jerry had caught it.

  
Forced back for a moment, Raiden decided to spend the next breather period between the assassin running out of bullets and yet another identical sub-machine gun getting himself back to the bar. He vaulted over, and proceeded to grab bottles and chuck them. He managed to get three or so out before bullets started flying again. As he would have expected from a cyborg, Jerry wasn't terribly impressed by a bunch of awkward lobbed projectiles and dodged them without incident. Raiden didn't much care, as he reached into his little storage area for something. He just wanted the assassin to be expecting something thrown and easily dodged.

  
Sure enough, when the cyborg got back up and started lobbing things again, Jerry didn't pay it much mind. He took one step to the side, let the projectile sail harmlessly past, and snatched the gun out from out of the air. It was while all this was happening, though, that he recognized that the thing he dodged wasn't a bottle, but instead some round metallic ball. A ball that looked kind of like a grenade. And as he realized his mistake, the grenade went off. He half expected to be blown to bits, but instead he suddenly his arms, parts of his face... actually, about forty percent of his body... all suddenly felt like it weighed a million pounds, forcing him nearly to his knees. When Jerry managed to finally get control of his body back, feeling his cybernetics lumber back to life, he turned and saw that his opponent had decided to cut the counter that his machine gun toting partner had been hiding behind in half. Oh, and he also cut his partner in half, along with it.

  
Jerry didn't even bother to grab the gun on the floor, knowing that by the time he'd be halfaway to trying, the cyborg would be on him. Instead, he decided to put his new military hardware to good use. He swung, sending a glorious shower of sparks flying off of the blade Raiden threw up in defense. He swung again, watching Raiden buckle slightly under the force of his blows, but knowing that he wasn't going to get anywhere just hitting the flat of a sword. So, on the follow-through, Jerry decided to just reach out, grab the flinching cyborg by the collar of his Hawaiian shirt, and toss him right into the closest wall.

  
Raiden busted through the cheap, not-up-to-code mortar with hardly any resistance. He found himself in the little dead space underneath the DJ's booth. He considered his options. Staying in here was a poor move, tactically speaking. It was dark, it was cramped, it smelled like cheap mortar and sheetrock dust. Still, if he could lure Jerry in here... wait, where was Jerry going? And that was when Raiden noticed Jerry had the dropped gun in his hand; he cursed his inattention as bullets bounced off his body with stinging force.

  
The message recieved, Raiden was back out onto the dance floor proper. He charged, his sword clashing against Jerry's raised forearm with a solid clanking of metal. He pulled back and swung again, and then again, each time being swatted aside by a powerful backhand. Jerry managed to get a swing in, himself, which Raiden managed to block.

  
Raiden saw the hand coming, this time. He hopped to one side, letting the grab go sailing past, and by pure reflex also managed to get a slash in, as well, which Jerry wasn't quite in a position to block. Jerry was sent reeling; the next punch he sent was so easy to see, Raiden managed to completely break his stance with a particularly hard parry. And then, all it took was one kick to the solar plexus, boosted a bit by the little jet propulsion units in his legs, for Jerry to take a turn tumbling into the dead space under the DJ booth.

  
And it was at that point that that split second Raiden spent trying to strategize bore fruit.

  
He jumped up, very high up, nearly to the window of the DJ booth, and he began to cut. Somewhere, there had to be studs that held the booth up, and if they were as poorly constructed as the rest of this building's structures... fortunately for him, he didn't really need to seek the wooden beams out; being a man who could cut multiple times a second meant he could just hack and hack until the thing fell down. And fall down it did, dropping wood, mortar, and number one jams directly on top of the assassin, who had been in the process of trying to escape, before the sheer weight of shoddy building pinned him to the floor.

  
Raiden landed in front of his trapped opponent, pointing his sword in the man's face in an effort to discourage him from moving. "I won't ask again," Raiden said, his voice harsh and cold. "Where are your bosses? Why are they trying to revive the Sons of the Patriots program?"

  
Jerry coughed, spitting out sheetrock as he tried to keep his lungs from being squeezed too hard. "Fool," he chuckled. "You think they tell _me_ shit? All they said was to sit around this club and wait for the number fifty-one to come in. I don't know any more about the UAA than you do."

  
"What?" Raiden pushed his sword a milimeter closer. "You have to know something! Who gives you the orders? Who...?"

  
A sound caught Raiden's attention, something of an electric hum. Instinctively, he hopped to the side and rolled, just in time to see some man in jeans and a jacket come vaulting over where he had been standing, glowing blue sword raised, and plunge it directly into the back of the pinned assassin. Jerry stared up at the man, his eyes wide with surprise, pain, and anger. "Y...you!"

  
Unfortunately for him, the last noise he made was a spray of blood as his killer swiped upwards.

  
With that out of the way, Travis Touchdown turned to Raiden. "So... you're the one who decided to steal my fight."


	5. Chapter 5

_** Chapter Five ** _  
_NMR (Platinum Mix)_

 

  
"I should have figured this would happen eventually."

  
Raiden and Travis began to circle each other, the latter tracing lazy shapes in the air with the glow of his beam katana as he continued to speak with manufactured wistfulness. "You know," he began, "these last fifty ranked battles have been some of the best I've had. Every one of them unique, every one of them exciting. I defused an atom bomb with one stroke of my sword. I had a fivesome with Scandanavian swimsuit models. I had to cook ramen for the Prime Minister of Australia under penalty of rocket powered death."

  
Raiden's expression remained stony, as he waited for the inevitable ambush. "Sounds like a blast," he replied.

  
"Oh, it was." Travis looked slightly to the right of where Raiden was circling, in the direction of the camera. "I can't help but feel a little bit sorry for all the readers out there who are going to have to miss out, since this fanfic starts _in medias res."_

  
"Wait. Readers? Fanfic?"

  
Travis ignored Raiden's raised eyebrow and continued on. "And after fifty of the things, I had gotten all but convinced they weren't going to do it again. They wouldn't be so predictable to start pulling the anticlimax, 'let's let Travis think there's a cool boss fight coming, but have that boss be killed off at the last second by some random new character who's going to be a pain in his ass for the rest of the game' thing for a third time in a row."

  
Raiden could see the exit door pass Travis's shoulder. A hundred and eighty more degrees... "Listen," the cyborg said, "I'm not a hundred percent sure what you're talking about here..."

  
Travis stopped and pointed his katana at the cyborg. "You're not going to turn out to be my long-lost brother, too, are you?"

 

"What?"

  
"Never mind. It was stupid the first time."

  
Raiden had to stare, despite himself, before he managed to regain his composure. "You're Touchdown, right? I'm just looking for answers..." He managed to get the words "so whatever" out in the time it took for Travis to cross the distance of the dance floor and take a swipe, forcing Raiden to stop reasoning for just long enough to jump and roll to the side. "Dammit, listen to me!" Raiden shouted.

  
"No can do." Travis went back to swinging his sword randomly in the air and pacing, as though his little burst of energy didn't happen. "See, I don't know how it works in your neck of the woods, but I've never had a lot of patience for long, boring talk. You let that take over, and all of a sudden you've got people holding up the action to have long, repetitive talks on the phone or random scenes of... I dunno, little girls cooking eggs."

  
While all this was going on, the feed from Raiden's AR display was finally starting to pull up information. Or, more accurately, a lack thereof. He wasn't finding any evidence of cyber-augmentation, and there weren't any hits on the XIFF telling him who this man was supposed to be; either somebody in the black market had finally managed to figure out how to get the resources and infrastructure to mimic SOP, or... "Listen," Raiden surpressed the urge to curse his luck. Of all the times to run into an unaugmented civilian... "This is your only warning. Drop your weapon and vacate the premises or I will be for..."

  
He saw the angry assassin's muscles tense, in just the way he was worried they were going to tense, and hopped once again to the right before he could be introduced to the glowing blue sword that came flying his way. Another swing came at him, diagonally up and to the right. Acting on brute instinct, Raiden threw his sword up for a parry, realizing about a quarter of the way into the motion the danger invited. Thinking at a pace normally reserved for people with enhanced cybernetic reflexes, he tried his best to begin a spin, feeling the heat from the blade as it scraped against his back with the sound of a hollow electric impact.

  
Raiden fell low, tucked, and rolled, coming up to one knee and holding up his sword. Or at least, half of his sword. He stared dumbly at the broken blade, the end still glowing red hot from where the beam katana cut a diagonal chunk from it. And then he felt the assassin coming in close, again.

  
Raiden fell to the side, rolling onto his shoulders, and as Touchdown ran past, he flexed his cybernetic muscles with perfect coordination, wheeling around on his shoulderblades and sending a foot hooking into the back of his opponent's knee. While Travis flew off his feet and onto his back, Raiden stood on one hand and tossed his broken katana up, letting it snap into one of his heel arches, and brought it down like an ax.

  
And that was when his sword was cut into three pieces, falling out of his arch completely useless.

  
Thinking quickly, Raiden performed a handspring back onto his feet, just in time to see Travis surging up off the ground, his beam katana cutting erratic figures in the air. The cyborg shifted his body left, right, left, right, each time coming within scant millimeters from hot, lasery death. He arched his back, almost impossibly far, pulling his head back with it. He could feel the sparks fly as the beam katana just barely kissed the edge of his chrome chin.

  
He came back up, as Travis followed through and ran past. He reached into his improbably spacious tactical pouch, grabbing something that seemed to grab him back. He whipped it out and forward, where it snaked out as a long, heavy black cord of something. Travis grunted as it snapped around his chest and upper arms, staring down for a second to try and make sense of it. It seemed to be a series of robotic arms, alternately holding hands or joined at the shoulder socket. At the end was a knife, whose owner's hand held it dutifully to the assassin's throat.

  
Raiden yanked, tossing the assassin around and up into the air. The arms released their hold on Travis, unwinding him so that he spun in the air like a top. "Bull's-eye!" Raiden felt the world slow down, as he set his electrolytes to overclock his system. He was a blur of motion, swinging the mass of arms around like a double-ended pole arm, the arms bending and wrapping around his body, whenever they weren't busy cutting whistling arcs straight for the assassin.

  
And that was when Raiden's weapon broke into more pieces than he really cared to count, at the time.

  
Even so, Travis fell to the ground, cut and smacked around, his beam katana only putting up a modest defense of his vitals. Raiden stared at L'etranger, at this point little more than the two arms joined in the center, and at the pieces of arms and hands languishing on the floor in simulated pain. He tossed it aside, reaching into his tactical pouch for something else to use. "Had enough?" he shouted.

  
Travis laughed, a harsh, barking noise, as he pulled himself to his feet. "You kidding?" he taunted. "I've fought old ladies who hit harder than you."

  
Raiden's face screwed up, in mingled frustration and anger. He tossed something out, a crackling blue line of energy stretching from his hand, to an ornate metal sai. The weapon hooked into Travis's jacket, creating a link between the two fighters. A link that was quickly severed when Raiden came flying in, rockets blasting, with a dropkick to the chest.

  
Or, at least, that's how it usually goes. What he wasn't expecting was for Travis to see the kick coming, and to skirt to the side at the last possible moment.

  
The world seemed to slow down, as Travis pretty much did what came naturally to him. He slashed like a madman, filling the air with a cacophony of electric hums and crashes, watching the sparks of blue lightning fly from the cyborg with every swing as the assassin ran after Raiden. With his opponent reeling, he brought himself down low, tensed his muscles, and swung up with all his might.

  
His sword caught itself in one of the prongs of Raiden's sai. Or at least, in the area of crackling plasma that surrounded Raiden's sai. Raiden grit his teeth, mechanical structures in his body whining in protest as he forced the beam katana away from his already charred body. The two of them paused, for just a moment, to stare at their locked weapons, the both of them realizing in unison that _this_ weapon didn't seem like it was in any danger of being cut into pieces by Travis's sword.

  
Raiden couldn't help a grin of boyish triumph.

  
Suddenly, the fight was cut short by the sound of a coach's whistle. The two turned their heads away from the fight and at the entrance to the dance floor, where a young, blonde woman stood, with said whistle in one laboriously manicured hand and the other coquettishly resting on her hip.

  
"Zat ees enough," she said, with the sort of potent French accent that the author finds a bit hard to transcribe, sometimes, to the point where he's tempted to not bother. "The fight is over. Travis, you are now Rank Fifty."

  
"Oh, come on, Sylvia!" Travis shouted, driving his point home with an added push against Raiden's sai. "Is this just gonna be the running gag? You know the gamers get pissed whenever we steal boss fights from them!"

  
"What the hell are you talking about?" Raiden gruffed, returning the push and adding one of his own.

  
The woman named Sylvia put her whistle in a handbag that probably cost about as much as Raiden's cybernetic implants from the chest up, combined. She huffed. "Oh, quit taking it like a bitch," she said, with a tone that was just a little too "French maid in a skeezy eighties porno" to be in any way congruous with her words. "You should know the rules, by now. This is not the first sequel, after all."

  
"Sequel?" Raiden looked from one crazy talking person to the next, bemused. "Sequel to what?"

  
Travis snarled, shoving himself out of their deadlock with an air that just screamed "Fine!" He paced for a few seconds, muttering dark little oaths to himself about how characters in obscure, ultraviolent OVAs never had to take any of this kind of shit, before pointing his beam katana at Raiden. "This isn't over, old man," he promised. "If I find out you're taking over my spot as the main character, you're going down." He turned and started storming out, exhaling through his nose. Raiden caught him muttering "...unbeleivable..." as he left.

 

"Wait!" Raiden called. "What's going on? Main character for what?" He thought for a second, blinked, and snarled at the doorway. "And who are you calling 'old man?!'"

  
"Well, now," Sylvia let the assassin blow past him and started to cross the dance floor. "That just leaves the question of what to do with you, then."

  
"What does that mean?" Raiden asked. "Are you with the UAA?"

  
Sylvia didn't seem to hear him, or care, overly much. "You seem to be pretty skilled, Mister..."

  
"Uh, Raiden." The cyborg leaned back a bit, when the little French girl started getting a bit too close.

  
"I see..." Sylvia stared Raiden up and down, with the sort of casual, disapproving air one would normally give of a man dressed like somebody's dumpy, unfuckable uncle. "Perhaps you should try your hand at aiming for the top, like your new friend, Travis." She turned from him, reaching into her bag for a lipstick in a shade of pink that was almost impossibly bright. "There is always room for one more assassin in the game, you know."

  
Raiden shook his head. "Sorry. Not interested. I'm here for SOP, not whatever blood sport you've got going on."

  
Sylvia put her lipstick away, still not really affected as she dug around for something else. "Suit yourself. But, you should know, since you've defeated the fiftieth ranked assassin, that means you are now part of the system."

  
"The system?" Raiden was about to ask her to explain, when a bright flash caused him to flinch.

  
Sylvia had a camera in her hands, which she lowered just enough to give the cyborg a half-lidded smirk. "We'll be considering you number fifty-one, in Travis's place. It is a dangerous title to have; those below you will be constantly after your place in the rankings. You'll need to be on your guard at all times."

  
No hits on the XIFF. Raiden finally let his face plate open up and settle on either side of his face. She was another unaugmented civilian. "So, what," he asked, "is that supposed to be a threat?" He flinched, when the camera flashed a second time.

  
"Not a threat. Just business." Sylvia started to walk away, making a clearly purposeful attempt to stick as much seduction into her walk as she could. "If you want to know about SOP, perhaps you will find your answers further up the ranks. I'm sure you can find us, again, if you change your mind."

  
Raiden thought about going after her, but something told him he wasn't going to get much more information out of her, anyway. Besides, when he looked down at himself, seeing the charred muscle fiber and pockmarks from errant bullets, he realized that it might very well have been time for a tactical retreat.

  
As he moved to recover his equipment, and see if he couldn't find some nanopaste stored away in Jerry Preacher's prosthetics, the two remaining robotic arms that comprised Raiden's former pole-arm began the slow, mournful process of gathering up its other pieces, scooping up bits of arms and fingers and pulling them in, like a mother comforting its hurting child.


	6. Chapter 6

**Chapter Six**   
_I dunno... generic overworld theme. Fuck you._

 

  
There was something about the rumble of the Schpeltiger that had a nice, soothing effect on Travis. Particularly when he jacknifed the thing around a corner and heard the sound of someone _just_ managing to avoid being the victim of a hit and run. One of these days, the cops were going to give him a ticket, and he would actually honor that ticket. Neither of those things were going to happen today, however. Cops were practically an urban legend in Santa Destroy.

  
He caught a glimpse of the gym, as he blew past it at top speed. Looks like it's finally gonna open up, again, he thought to himself. Ever since he learned that Ryan, the previous owner, just so happened to be number... was it eighty five, or eighty four? The battles kind of started to run together, after the first fifteen. Anyway, ever since Ryan turned out to be part of the UAA, it had kind of been awkward trying to get mileage out of his membership. The poor leotard wearing bastard seemed to know that all that personal training was going to kill him, eventually. That being said, it was highly professional of the guy to do it, anyway. He even took a more hands-on approach, using some new techniques he invented. Travis had no idea there was so much power locked away in his glutes! He _still_ tingled a bit, when he thought about it!

  
He thought about immediately swinging home, popping in his advance import copy of _Bizarre Jelly: Fantastic Sparkle no Frendship Adventure,_ when he spotted the temp agency off in the distance. In the two or so seconds before it threatened to pass, he decided to pull a bootleg turn, squealing to a stop right in front of the door with only a mailbox and park bench suffering the wrath of his forced stop. Oh, no, wait. Someone's grandpa got it, too, but he was quiet about it. No matter. Travis didn't care about that; it was time to get _paid!_

  
"Yo, pops!" Travis said, almost before he'd managed to punt the door open. "I'm back. Job me!"

  
"Eh, what?" A goatee attached to a vaguely man-shaped mass of leather and muscle fiber glared at him from behind the desk. "You, again? I thought you'd be dead, by now."

  
"That's crazy," Travis replied. "I've been doing this for a while, now. I can handle your little goon squads."

  
"No, not them," Pops spat back, with a paradoxically belligerent smirk. "I meant actually having to work for a living. We still haven't managed to beat the slacker outta you."

  
Travis shook his head. "Well, then, I'm happy to disappoint. Now, have you got a job for me, or not?"

  
"Well, lessee..." Pops pulled up a set of papers, ignoring the stains starting to form from his eternally sweaty, callused hands. "Got a contract going for a new branch of Burger Suplex."

  
"What're they doing this time?" Travis asked. "Taco Suplex? Maybe Chinese Suplex?"

  
"Actually, they've gotten into the laundry business. After Pizza Bat went under, the ol' power vacuum resulted in a lot of industries opening up in places you wouldn't expect."

  
"Yeah, whatever. Listen, Pops, I was kinda hoping you had something a little more exciting lined up."

  
"And I was kinda hoping my wife would put out for _me_ this month, and not the mailmain, but we can't always get what we want." If Pops seemed to be in a bad mood, he was either expertly masking it, or taking genuine pleasure in taking it out on Travis. "I don't need a strikebreaker, this week. Unlike you, I finally managed to get some folks who wanna actually _work_ for a living." He shoved the by now sweat soaked contract to the front of the desk. "Take it or leave it, kid. Makes no difference to me, if you eat tonight."

  
Travis picked up the piece of paper with the tips of his index finger and thumb. "Whatever," he sighed. It wasn't as though being an unskilled laborer wasn't paradoxically more profitable in Santa Destroy than being an assassin, but God damn if it didn't get tedious after a while. He burst out the door about as violently as he burst in, ignoring the last little jab Pops had about his sneakers or whatever "young people" thing he took offense to, today.

  
Outside, he was surprised to see a trench coat hovering over his bike. Well, a trench coat and a hat. It was trying its darndest to look casual, as it circled around the back tire.

  
"Better be careful," Travis called out, grinning wolfishly as he let his free hand slowly fall back to the beam katana hanging off the back of his belt. "That thing's got a new paint job that's probably worth more than your life."

  
The trench coat made a high pitched little warble of panic, turning to face Travis with a move that seemed to cause its entire body to wobble and tilt dangerously. And then it ran off, its feet making a strange slapping noise as they hit the ground.  
Travis didn't really notice the fact that the trench coat seemed to be running away on a set of barely perceptible black hands, instead just shrugging his shoulders at the missed opportunity for a fight. He climbed back on the Schpeltiger and promptly forgot about it.

  
In a nearby alleyway, however, the trench coat watched him leave with a nervous shuffle. A single robotic eye flashed to life, in the little opening made in the coat's chest. It looked down in the direction of its crotch, wondering to it if it managed to get the tracking device planted.

  
A black arm snaked out of the coat's bottom and gave an enthusiastic thumb's up, before slipping back into hiding.

 

The trench coat's gut began to chirp warily, as if concerned that the scary man might notice what they put on his precious motorcycle.

  
The chest shook its top hand back and forth, in a way that made it look like the hat it was hidden inside was saying "No." It wasn't like it mattered, it seemed to say. They did what the Boss expected of them, and it wasn't part of their programming to have to think any further than that.

  
The trench coat's groin began to chirp and whistle excitedly. Apparently, now that the job was done, it really wanted to head down to the shore and go collect coconuts, like the rest of the body promised.

  
The gut voiced its continued trepidation, being more than happy to remember just how mean the Boss could be, when they went off on their own.

  
However, the groin was adamant. After all, coconuts were apparently worth more than human life in Santa Destroy. Imagine what they could buy with all those LB Dollars!

  
The trench coat's chest was hesitant, fancying itself the leader, however it was predictable when it came to matters of money. It eventually relented, naturally phrasing it as though going to the shore had been its idea, the entire time.  
The groin whistled in unabashed glee, sending the entire trench coat barreling down the road in a terrifying, wobbling mockery of human locomotion.

***  
"Bladewolf, come in."

  
No answer. Raiden grit his teeth.

  
"Bladewolf, respond!"

  
Still no answer.

  
_"Bladewoooooolf!"_

  
Raiden shut down his Codec with a muttered curse. He should have known that screaming someone's name over radio communication wasn't going to make them hear you, but it was just so easy to forget that, in the moment. He put his finger back to his ear and began to pull up his lists of contacts.

  
_Churrip, churrip!_ went the outgoing Codec call chime, followed a moment later by a familiar face appearing on Raiden's AR display.

  
"Kevin."

  
"Raiden?" The man on the other side ran a hand through his corn rows and sighed. "It's been a while. I was starting to think you lost this frequency."

  
"Sorry. Hope I'm not interrupting something important."

  
"No, not really. A couple of trade negotiations in Singapore are wrapping up, now, so they've got me on standby. What's going on? Where are you?"

  
"I'm back in the States. Santa Destroy, California. Bladewolf was here, but I lost contact with him."

  
Kevin huffed. "So, lemme guess. The only reason you called is 'cause you need my help."

  
"I'm afraid so. He said he was headed towards something called an Akashic Point. Any chance you can find out where that is?"

  
"Well, hold on a second." Kevin leaned forward, tapping away on the computer to which the Codec's camera was apparently installed, in the absence of the unaugmented human's cybernetics. "Uh... you're gonna have to narrow that down for me. Says here Santa Destroy's got three of them."

  
"Three of them? What even _are_ they?"

  
"You know, I think I've heard of these places. They say the ghosts of violent killers congregate there, letting their negative emotions fester until they become demons."

  
"Ghosts?" said the cyborg soldier, formerly an agent of a league of supersoldiers nanomachined to the hilt. "Don't tell me you believe that nonsense."

  
"I dunno. Says here a lot of nasty things have happened, there."

  
"It's probably something to do with this UAA business," Raiden insisted. "Can you send the information over? I'll try and figure out which one Bladewolf went to by isolating his last known location."

  
"All right. Sending it, now."

  
Raiden's Soliton Radar pinged, telling him that new information was available. "All right, got it. I owe you for this, Kev."

  
Kevin chuckled. "Hey, you can make it up by not flaking on me, again. Seriously, you've got friends here at Maverick. You don't have to be a stranger, just because you're out fighting your little personal fight."

  
Raiden's jaw set for a second, as he thought that over. "Yeah. You're right. Everyone else still on their old frequencies? I'll drop them a line, when I've got a moment."

  
"Pshh. You think Boris would shell out for new proprietary frequencies, if he didn't have to? The man's still as stingy as..." The sound of a deep-voiced, very annoyed Russian from off in the distance interrupted Kevin's thought. He mashed down on a button with a panicked. "Whoops. Gotta go!"

  
Raiden chuckled to himself, as he stepped over a half of a body and emerged from the alleyway. "Sounds like they haven't changed a bit." He stepped into another alley, which led around a building, and a few moments later a cyborg in a Hawaiian shirt was seen barreling down the road on a blue and black classic chopper, in the textbook definition of "subtle."


	7. Chapter 7

**Chapter Seven**  
_Setting Sun_

  
Trying to find an Akashic point seemed to be a tall order, and not just because the idea was too ridiculous on its face to ever be real. Mostly, the story of where in Santa Destroy you could even _find_ them changed constantly. Apparently, every single place in which somebody ever experienced anything weird or unexplained, or anywhere that happened to be within spitting distance of a business hoping to draw in crowds of brooding teenagers, just so happened to also be an Akashic point. Fortunately, Raiden had professional intel on his side, to weed out the locations that were secretly trying to sell him screamo-branded energy drinks.

  
And so it was, that Raiden found himself in front of Santa Destroy Junior High. Or, at least, the building that _used_ to be Santa Destroy Junior High, before the Spring Dance Incident rendered it unusable as a center of juvenile education. Raiden pulled himself off of his motorcycle and took the building in. The windows were smashed, the walls were riddled with what appeared to be the pockmarks of indiscriminately fired bullets, there was graffiti in English and... was that Japanese? How unusually cosmopolitan, for street artwork, Raiden found himself thinking.

  
The front door wasn't locked. Which wasn't to say it was unlocked. Rather, its lock had been rendered useless by what appeared to be an excessive amount of explosives. Raiden stepped past the charred remains of the metal and glass door. No sooner had he crossed the threshold than a sound caused him to jump. He was down in a stance, clawed hands at the ready to start tearing, before he realized it was just the chirp of his Codec going off in his head.

  
Raiden pressed a finger to his ear. "Raiden," he said.

  
A series of garbled noises answered him, lost amid electrical static and background noise.

  
Raiden furrowed his brow. "Who is this? Your signal's weak."

  
The voice on the other end seemed to be struggling to speak, as though throats were something they were unaccustomed to using. Raiden managed to catch the words "ring" and "AR display," in the mass of strangled choking. He couldn't help but feel like there was something borderline recognizable in that voice.

  
"Who is this?" Raiden repeated. "Identify yourself. How did you get this frequency?"

  
Raiden managed to catch that the Codec display in front of him was displaying a null entry for the incoming call's frequency number, before it disconnected and the virtual screen winked out entirely. Gritting his teeth, he tried to pull up the number for Doktor, hoping that the man might be able to help trace that call.

  
_Churrip, churrip... churrip, churrip.._. No answer. Raiden tried someone else.

  
_Churrip, churrip... churrip, churrip..._ Boris wasn't picking up, either.

  
A noise beyond his heads up display pulled him away just as he was about to accuse Kevin of lying about the frequencies being the same. It sounded like... giggling? Who was giggling, in a place like this? Raiden's heels clicked against the dirty, cracked tile floor as he followed the source of the insipid laughter. Cautiously, he peered around the door frame and into the classroom, where he was sure he could hear it coming from.

  
Empty. And the laughter had stopped. Raiden slipped into the room, eyes carefully sweeping left and right and finding nothing other than broken desks, bullet holes, and what appeared to be burns from beam katanas. Whatever happened here, it was like a war had taken place.

  
Towards the back of the room, desperately out of place for it's apparent newness in the surrounding decay and age, was a lone cardboard box. The letters H-I-D-E-O were printed on one side; Raiden had to make a slow circuit around it to figure out that it actually spelled out a company along all its faces: Hideous Freight, Ltd. What a stupid name for a company, Raiden began to think.

  
Suddenly, the box giggled. Raiden flinched, claws out. "Who's that?"

  
The box only responded with more giggles, shaking in mirth and excitement.

  
Raiden snarled. "I know you're there. Come out slowly, with your hands up."

  
Suddenly, the box stopped laughing, snapping back into stillness with a violence that kicked up a little plume of dust around itself. Raiden approached the box carefully. He tapped at it with his foot. No response.

  
Slowly, oh so terribly slowly, he reached down and put his hands around the sides. The box came up without resistance, the bottom falling away as he lifted it over his head. He looked down, at the patch of floor where the box had lain, and there he saw...

  
...nothing.

  
Tension hissed out of Raiden's nose, as his eyes widened in disbelief. He knew what he saw. He knew what he had heard. Were his cybernetics failing him? Or was somebody playing a trick? The word "ghost" popped into his head, unbidden, which he immediately quashed. It wasn't as if...

  
_Chirrup, chirrup..._

  
Raiden flinched in the direction of his head's up display, as another Codec call came in. The next thing he swore he noticed was the faintest of shimmers, the softest of sounds of motion. And then, all of a sudden, something was wrapping itself around his midsection, invisible arms clamping down with sudden force.

  
He barely had time to say "Wha...?" before his thoughts were cut short by a violent explosion.

***

  
When he came to, he was dimly aware of the fact that some time must have passed. At least, the lack of sunlight coming in from the windows told him that much. He looked down at his body. Scorch marks covered his entire front, and he could see a couple of exposed, frayed wires. Electrolyte fluid stained the ground. Considering he was the only cyborg he was aware of for miles, it stood to reason that was his fluid.

  
A sound filtered in from the hallway outside. Giggling. Raiden tried to get up, but he could only get about halfway to sitting before blinding pain took his breath away. Desperately, he swung his head around, trying to find something he could use. Anything.

  
His eyes fell on the empty box, now charred and crumbled into bits just inside arm's reach. Something metallic glinted just inside. The cyborg reached out and wrapped his hand around it, pulling it out into the light to reveal... a gun. A Mark 23 pistol, to be precise.

  
_Chirrup, chirrup..._ His Codec answered itself before he even registered the number. The null entry caller began to gurgle something into his ear almost immediately.

  
"Who are you?" Raiden shouted, a tad too loudly, in retrospect.

  
The door to the classroom swung open, seemingly of it's own accord. Raiden could hear the faint sound of slapping, as of bare feet against stone floors. There was the faintest shimmer from the doorway. It began to laugh.

  
The choking noise from the Codec began to make some noises that Raiden assumed had to be authoritative barking. Again, he could barely make out the words "AR display." Confused, Raiden did what he guessed he was being told, snapping his augmented reality visor over his face.

  
The shimmer immediately took form, glowing against the blue background that Raiden's visor painted the dark room in. It looked to be a human, or at least a collection of rough slabs of meat in the basic shape of a human. It toddled over to Raiden with a gait like an old man with leg issues, giggling to itself like it was about to play the greatest possible prank. For reasons Raiden couldn't begin to guess, its right elbow seemed to glow with an intensity that the AR display registered as significant.

  
Without pausing to really think about it, Raiden lifted the gun and took a shot at the glowing elbow. The laughing man stopped dead in its tracks, as if frozen in time, before suddenly bursting into a cloud of glowing, marble-like spheres. The spheres scattered, swarmed in the air, and gathered back together on Raiden's body. The cyborg panicked, thinking he was about to be blown up again, until he realized that they were absorbing into his body.

  
Silence reigned over the classroom, after that. Raiden could only stare down at his body in confusion. He felt... better. Not repaired, or anything, but at least getting up and moving felt like more of an option. What was that stuff? It seemed to act like nanopaste, the way it worked on his body.

  
The voice on the Codec gurgled in his ear, some more. Something about smiles and being a soldier.

  
"Right." Raiden put a finger to his ear as he pulled himself to his feet. "I'm not gonna ask again. Who is this?"

  
The voice gruffed something. It was a very familiar gruff.

  
"Wait a minute... Snake? Snake, is that you? I thought you were..."

  
The Codec call disconnected. Raiden took his finger off his ear and balled his hand into a fist. None of it. He wasn't willing to believe any of what was going on. This was a trick. This was some kind of Psycho Mantis level mind games. He needed to keep his head. He needed to remember what was real, and what was fake.

  
He stared down at his other hand. The gun he had felt real enough. The wounds from that explosion felt real. Whatever that... thing was, it was hard to pretend there wasn't a threat, here.

  
"I can do this," he said to himself, as he moved to peek around the doorway into the hall. "Just gotta take this one slow."

  
His mutters to himself was greeted with giggles coming from further down the hall. Raiden took a deep breath, held his gun in both hands, and stepped out.


	8. Laser Spin Cycle

**Chapter Eight**   
_Laser Spin Cycle_

  
The press slapped down on some overly expensive dress shirt with a soft hiss of steam. Travis could only stare off into the middle distance as the machine did whatever the heck it was supposed to be doing, to get wrinkles out of clothes or something. It used to be, he could just pretend this sort of thing was a slightly amusing faux-retro video game, but apparently, when the budget for this particular installment increased, that was the first thing to go. Now it was back to shitty rote-work, no more involved than a couple of waggles of the Joy-Con. Travis could only suppose it was the cost of making it big, but damn if it didn't drive him up a wall, every time he had to do it.

  
A harsh buzzing noise pulled him from his impatient self-pity. Sounds like his laundry was finally done. "It's about fucking time," he muttered. Had his bosses come in at any point, during the past few hours, they might have had something to say about him using their washers to finally deal with his many, many shirts. They might have at least raised an eyebrow at him having thrown the one he was currently wearing in, and walking around their laundromat bare-chested. Fortunately for him, it seemed like this was one of those businesses that was run by a name on a cagey lease agreement, not by an actual person, so he was in the clear.

  
As he reached a hand into the dryer drum, checking to see if his collection of T-shirts were dry enough to take out, he was suddenly aware of somebody else in the room, with him. He spun around, taking a nice, long look around. There was a box on the floor, tucked away in a corner. One of those "Hideous Freight" company boxes. Travis didn't remember it being there, before.

  
"You know," he said to the box, with an air of affected, casual calm, "I don't know what it is, but lately it seems like I've been dealing with a lot of folks sneaking around. Why don't you come on out, and give me your speech like a boss is supposed to?"

  
Slowly, with a sound not unlike a child anticipating getting spanked by their well-intentioned, but in all honesty kind of abusive step-dad, somebody emerged from behind the box, holding their hands up in surrender. "Please," he whimpered, "I-I-I can explain..."

  
Travis raised an eyebrow. The thing about Mr. Touchdown was, it took a fair amount of effort for him to look the way he did. Just because he pulled a good half of his T-shirts literally out of dumpsters didn't mean he didn't take the time to carefully curate... well, actually he didn't take any time at all, really. In fact, at that very moment he was putting on a faded pink affair that, for reasons known only to the designer, had a picture of a peach about to be punted by a soccer player on the front, as he stared at this intruder. The point, in this roundabout collection of words, was that very few people ever went out of their way to look like Travis did.

  
And then, suddenly, there was this jackass. Everything from the faded jeans to the deceptively expensive sneakers, the set of his hair and the opaquness of his shades, was more or less a perfect match to the kinds of things Travis himself would have gone on the town with. The only thing that prevented the assassin from thinking he was staring in the mirror was the man's face, which seemed to be stuck on a permanent state of "I have resigned myself entirely to a life of being the bottom of every relationship I will ever be in."

  
"I can explain," the well-dressed stranger repeated.

  
"Oh, please," Travis growled. "By all means, explain to me what's going on. How the hell did you manage to copy my style?"

  
"I went to Area 51," the stranger explained, meekly. "The... the store you go to? You have pictures of it all on your FaceBatt."

  
"Oh." Any attempt, on Travis's end, to remain belligerent started the slow process of evaporating, at that. Truth be told, it had been difficult to even maintain his anger, in the face of this man and his "I was picked last for sports I never even participated in" expression. "Right."

  
The silence settled in, as heavy and as awkward as the discovery of a new fetish. The well-dressed stranger shuffled from foot to foot, rubbing at his forearm, distractedly. Travis felt an urge to clear his throat, then scratch at his chin. Somewhere, in the distance, a car drove past, blaring obnoxious club music that could be heard clearly, even through several concrete walls. One of the dryers shuddered to a stop. Travis could have sworn he saw some kind of bug skitter across the floor, out of the corner of his eye.

  
Finally, the stranger spoke up, reluctantly. "You... you're Travis Touchdown, right?"

  
"What?" Travis waved his hand, as if the offense of such a question was a fart, he could fan away. "You can't be seriously suggesting you don't know who I am, in a getup, like that."

  
"Well, you see..." the stranger rubbed his arm, some more, with all the care of someone who was recently punched there. "...I kind of haven't. My girlfriend has, though. She's... kind of a fan. That's why she makes me dress like you, and why she, um..."  
"Woah, woah, woah, wait." Travis held both hands up, as if the ludicrousness of what he was hearing could be physically pushed away from him. "Girlfriend?"

  
"Oh, yeah!" The stranger seemed just as confused as Travis was, by the concept, but there was no denying that the concept was certainly enough to brighten his mood, considerably. "She's great. She's super hot, and she doesn't laugh at me, when we... um... well, we don't really... in fact, we've never... in, like the four years we've been together... and she doesn't like to be seen with me... but the point is, if we did, she probably wouldn't laugh at me."

  
"Right. Of course." Travis Touchdown was hardly a success with the ladies. In fact, he was probably a failure, largely because the women in his life weren't like the ones in all the anime he watched. Also, they usually wanted nothing to do with a shut-in NEET who lived in a cheap motel room, filled with wrestling memorabilia, clothes recovered from a dumpster, and the ever growing collection of limited edition merchandise from the video game series he knew only slightly better than the back of his genatalia. All that having been said, both he and the stranger could thoroughly appreciate which one of them was the one-eyed man in the land of the permanent Incels.

  
He forced the idea from his mind. His sanity would not allow him to do anything else. Instead, he reached to his belt and put his hand on the handle to his beam katana and said. "So, are we fighting, or what?"

  
"W-wait!" The stranger held up his hands, in a panic. "Please, wait, Mr. Touchdown. I don't wanna fight you. That's what... um... I wanna... wanna..."

 

"Wanna what?" Travis didn't remove his hand from his sword handle. If anything, he gripped it tighter. "Listen, if this is a proposition for some kind of cuckolding thing, I'm really not interested."

  
"You're _not?_ " The stranger blurted out, before realizing what he said and backpedaling. "N-n-no! That's not it, Mister Touchdown, sir."

  
"Well, then spit it out! I haven't got all day!" That was a bold-faced lie, but Travis had the feeling he wouldn't be questioned on it, as long as he said it meanly enough.

  
He was right, if the nervous squeak from the stranger was any indication. "Yes, of course. Sorry. Um... so... you're, like... an assassin, right? The UAA is about assassins, and stuff, and they um... they k-k-k-kill people?"

  
"That's right."

  
"Well, um... my girlfriend thought, if I could do the stuff that you do, she might... you know. So, she signed me up for the UAA."

  
"You're a ranked assassin?" Travis would have raised an eyebrow, but to be honest it was probably still raised from the whole "girlfriend" thing.

  
"Uh-huh. Number one-thirty seven, last I checked. It used to be lower, but you've been killing people, and I've been going up. Thing is, there's guys below me, too, and they've been trying to get to the top. I've been shot at and stabbed at and... blown up...at... more times than I can count, and..."

  
"Right." Travis interrupted. "Sorry. Not interested."

  
"Wait!" whined the stranger, with a whine not unlike a particularly whiny drill. "Mr. Touchdown, please, just hear me out!"

  
Travis began to busy himself, with collecting his clothes out of the dryer. "No can do, buddy. I've got better things to do than go around fighting other people's battles, for them. Besides, there's no way I'm getting to the top, if I'm stuck fighting small fry."

  
"I know who number forty-nine is."

  
Travis flinched. Not just because of what the stranger said, which was so specifically something that Travis wanted to hear, it was spooky. The tone of the stranger's voice, when he said it, was maybe just a demi-tone different, less pathetic sounding. He turned around, to look the stranger in the eye.

  
If the stranger was more confident, however, his expression of "I didn't even qualify for participation awards, in elementary school" did nothing to betray it. "Sir," he muttered.

  
"How do you know number forty-nine?" Travis asked. "Normally, I have to hear about it, from Sylvia, after I've paid her."

  
"I checked her FaceBatt," the stranger explained. "She keeps in touch with all the high-ranking assassins, on there."

  
"Shit." Travis scratched at his chin, with a frustrated scowl. He hadn't heard that Sylvia was even _on_ FaceBatt, let alone following assassins. He decided not to voice that particular thought, however, lest the stranger get any ideas about how they might be in any way similar. "So, let me get this straight," he said. "I help get some of these lower ranking guys off your back, and you tell me where I can find number forty-nine, is that right?"

  
The stranger nodded, his face a fragile ember of hope not dissimilar from a puppy eyeing a T-bone steak.

  
Travis sighed, reaching into the dryer drum and shoveling shirts out into a basket. "Right. Just let me know where I have to go."

  
"Oh, that's easy!" The stranger began to rummage around in his pocket, producing a phone and immediately waggling his finger along its screen. "Turns out a lot of them hang out in the same places. I checked their movements on..."

  
"No, don't tell me. You checked their FaceBatt."

  
"Uh-huh!" The stranger sidled up alongside Travis, in order to give the assassin a better view of his screen. "See? Right here, is where you'll find them. Oh!" Realizing something, he turned to Travis and extended a hand, as if to shake. "I'm Jimmy, by the way."

  
Silence settled in, once again. Travis stared down at Jimmy's hand, the way one would stare at a three armed slug. Another one of the dryers stopped, with a noise that suggested that it was destined to one day break catastrophically and burn the whole place down. A single gunshot rang out, in the background, followed by another, followed by what sounded, for all the world, like an entire army batallion engaging in a death blossom.

  
Jimmy slowly, apologetically returned his arm to his side, slid back into position, and directed Travis's attention to his cell phone screen.


	9. Chapter 9

**Chapter Nine**  
_Split Mind_

  
The creature lunged, screaming and laughing even as Raiden put a bullet in its shoulder and stopped it dead in its tracks. The one behind him, oblivious to its ally bursting into strange, colorful bubbles, continued to totter over, giggling like he just remembered a really sophomoric joke. That is, until Raiden craned his arms down, lined his Mark 23 sights with the glowing spot on the creature's knee, and dropped a bullet into it.

  
Raiden waited for the strange glowing foam to make its way to his body and do...whatever the hell it seemed to be doing to him. As good as it was that it seemed to be doing some good for the wounds he had sustained, from that first...whatever the hell these things are, he still couldn't bring himself to trust...whatever the hell these bubbles were. He had to suppress an urge to put a finger to his ear and try, for the fifth time, to raise somebody on the Codec, in the hopes that maybe they could explain what the hell was going on. Preferably in great detail, with a good explanation for the science and historical background behind...whatever the hell...

  
A scuffling noise, ahead of him, forced him back into reality. "Right," he told himself, mostly in an effort to finally be able to hear a human voice, again. "So, here's what I know. These people are... some kind of suicide bombers. Maybe they set their nanomachines to explode, or something. If they grab me, then they blow themselves up. But there's a weak spot, that I can apparently see in my AR headset, and if I hit that, then they... deactivate? And they... turn into nanopaste, which is why they can repair my body."

  
He rounded a corner, carefully checking for enemies before pointing his gun down the new hallway. "Fortunately," he continued muttering, "I haven't lost any of my muscle memory, after years of cybernetic enhancement. If I had an HF blade, it would be better, but after all that time training in virtual reality, I should still be good for hitting targets in close quarters. As long as..."

  
He yelped, nearly jumping out of his cybernetic skin, as his Codec suddenly shrilled into his ear. When he had sufficiently recovered, he tapped his ear with one finger. The null entry appeared in his AR display, crackling in his ear as though throats were still an utterly foreign concept to him.

  
"You again," Raiden growled. "Identify yourself!"

  
The voice crackled back. It was strangely articulate, for something that sounded like it had to be in so much pain.

  
"I don't believe you!" he replied. "Solid Snake died, a long time ago. Who is this?"

  
The sound that came back to him was strained. Strained and distressingly wet.

  
Raiden scoffed. "Well, you certainly know enough about him to copy his 'soldier' lines, exactly. What-" The sound of a shrieking creature behind him interrupted his train of thought for just a moment. After he had whipped around, parried the incoming arms with his gun, and gave the offending enemy a generous portion of lead, for its trouble, he returned his attention to the Codec call. "What do you want?"

  
The voice at the other end began to launch into a speech. Well, to call it a speech would imply that intelligible speech actually happened. It would perhaps be more accurate to say that a long, almost interminable series of croaking whispers happened, in the vicinity of the small bones around Raiden's prosthetic ear. In the time it took for the horrid, gurgling noises to finally wind down to something resembling a conclusion, Raiden had time to reach the end of the hall, step through a door, find a courtyard, cross the courtyard, ponder for a moment as to whether or not he was going in the right direction, ponder for another moment whether or not there was even a right direction to go to, get the idea that perhaps he should check his Soliton Radar, realize that his Soliton Radar was, in fact, going the way of his Codec, and was equally useless to him, enter a door into another part of the school, bypass a pair of extremely oblivious, giggling creatures who didn't see or hear him, despite being pointed _right_ at him, and eventually find his way into a gymnasium.

  
He chuckled. "Seems like you also share the man's penchant for long speeches. Fine then, I'll be sure to take it under advisement." He blinked, as a thought occurred to him. "Wait a minute. How come I can understand...?"

  
The call cut out, before he could finish that thought. Raiden set his chromed jaw, in frustration. "Great," he muttered. "As if things couldn't get any... more..."

  
When he looked up, towards the center of the gym, he found his eye was naturally drawn to the one spot in the center, on which apparently the only working light in the school was focused. It was a cyborg, like him, and like him the man was clearly making no effort to hide it. Well, aside from the fact that, for some reason, he was just the faintest bit translucent, but that was neither here nor there. The point was, Raiden recognized the man, with his lanky features, pale skin, pale hair, and the pattern on his red and black frame reminiscent of countless deep lacerations.

  
"Monsoon?" Raiden shook his head. "What are you doing here?"

  
The cyborg named Monsoon held out his hands and gave Raiden a series of lofty, borderline-pretentious sounding gurgles.

  
"No," Raiden snarled. "Not you, too. You're dead. I killed you myself, in Denver."

  
Monsoon made a vague gesture in Raiden's direction, as if compelling him to provide an answer to the question that rasped out of the man's lips.

  
"The... the Akashic Point? Wait a minute. Are you trying to tell me that all that stuff about this being a place where the barrier between worlds is thinner is the reason you're here?"

  
Monsoon took a theatrical interest in the void off to his right, as he set about explaining, in explicit detail, the workings of the Akashic Points and their contribution to his presence, before the man he had once faced in combat. It was nothing if not an informative monologue, even if Raiden was wholly unable to accept the premise. Not when there were more reasonable answers like... nanomachines? Nanomachines, that had to be it.

  
In either case, it did nothing to put Raiden at ease. He advanced slowly, gun raised. "All right," he said, "then, why did you go to all the trouble, to come back? Is it another chance to get me? Revenge?"

  
Monsoon gurgled a disbelieving parrot of Raiden's last words, turning his head to meet Raiden's gaze. Or, at least, as close as they could get, when they were both staring at each other from behind visors. He began to pace off to his right, making sweeping gestures as he carefully explained why he held no malice for what Raiden did to him.

  
"I suppose I should have expected that from you," Raiden was forced to concede. "You always did go on about the natural order of things. What was it you always said?" Monsoon began to answer, only to have Raiden parrot him, halfway through. "'The strong prey on the weak.' Yeah, that was it." As much as he should have known better, something about having a familiar face in front of him, who seemed to have no interest in threatening him, was making him the faintest bit nostalgic. He lowered his gun and smiled, shaking his head. "I'd say you make me sound like some kind of wild animal, but then, we both know what happened in Denver."

  
Monsoon allowed himself a laugh. It was a guttural, horrific noise.

  
Raiden chuckled back. "That plan of yours and Sam's really backfired, didn't it? Waking up the Ripper, and everything."

  
Monsoon shrugged, gurgling out something far too confident to be coming from the mouth of a dead man.

  
"You _would_ think that, wouldn't you? Anyway, if you're not here to fight me, maybe you could help me?"

  
Monsoon squelched, questioningly.

  
"It's Bladewolf. I'm looking for him. Last I heard from him, he was passing through one of these Akashic Points. You haven't seen him around, have you?"

  
Monsoon thought, for a moment, and then shook his head.

  
"Yeah," Raiden sighed. "I suppose that would just be a bit _too_ easy. Well, all right. I suppose I'll have to keep looking, until I find a trace of him." Taking a step back, he extended a friendly wave, in the cyborg's direction. "Take care of yourself, Monsoon. At least... as well as you can, given the circumstances."

  
Monsoon extended a hand and a gurgle, causing Raiden to pause for a moment. He then began to offer a series of croaks that forced Raiden to fold his arms, pensively.

  
"So," Raiden clarified, "you want to tag along with me? And do what, exactly? Be, like, my supernatural eyes and ears? Tell me what's going on, up ahead, stuff like that?"

  
Monsoon nodded, but added a couple of noncommittal rasps, on top of his suggestions.

  
"Hmmm..." Raiden worked his jaw, abstractedly, as he considered the situation, in front of him. "Well, I can honestly say I wasn't expecting today to go quite like this, but at this point, I'll take all the help I can get. If you wanna stick around, for a little bit, I won't stop you."

  
That seemed to make Monsoon happy, if his dramatic flair of the hands was any indication. He squelched and whispered something thoroughly pretentious in bearing, if not in content.

  
"Well... I guess you'd know better than I would," Raiden was forced to confess, before a thought came to him. "Oh, by the way, maybe you might be able to answer this, for me. How is it I can understand you, even though you're all garbled? Why are you talking, like that?"

  
The expression on the other cyborg's face suggested that he had had plenty of time and cause to think about the question, himself. He opened his mouth and began to launch into a long, erudite explanation as to his theories on the world between worlds, the Akashic Points, and his place in both of these new, mysterious locations.

  
However, right at that moment, Raiden heard a click, behind him. He leapt to the side, just before a shower of bullets came flying past. They carried on, before raining down directly onto Monsoon. Despite his semi-transparent nature, it seemed as though bullets were actually quite effective; Monsoon jerked and spasmed, as round after round peppered his stomach, chest, arms, legs... it was really a rather chaotic spray, all said, only really scoring hits through sheer, overwhelming volume.

  
"Monsoon!" Raiden cried. He could only watch, helplessly, as the cyborg was shot. And then, he could only keep watching. And keep watching. And keep... Raiden didn't know what part of this situation he should have been more amazed by: Monsoon for taking so many bullets, or whatever gun was firing all those bullets without exploding from the heat coming off of the cartridges. Both of them were a feat of modern engineering, at this point.

  
Eventually, the bullets stopped. Not because of an explosion, but because the shooter finally seemed to just... stop. Monsoon hit the ground, or at least, what little was left of Monsoon after his cybernetic body was stripped away like a statue in especially violent acid rain. And then, suddenly, the room was silent.

  
Raiden tried to listen for the sound of a weapon reloading. Of course, he wouldn't be surprised if a weapon like that simply didn't need to reload. As it turned out, however, what he got instead was the sound of approaching footsteps. Then, the lound, percussive clank of another ceiling light turning on.

  
Standing in the center of this new light source was a young woman, dressed in what looked, for all the world, like a schoolgirl's uniform. Indeed, she would look very much like a typical girl, were it not for the oversized head, with oversized, dead eyes. Or the high-powered automatic rifle. Raiden opened his mouth, to ask a question, but was interrupted by the sound of blaring, heroic theme music.

  
"Kusatta Hakidameni Oritati..." said the schoolgirl, striking a pose while the light around her turned a brilliant shade of purple. "Zyunzyou Karenna Hanaitirin," she continued, twirling and pointing her gun in various directions. "Butano Murewo Ayametekureyou HEAD MASTER NEET GIRL..." She finished her routine by dropping to one knee and pointing her gun directly at the surviving cyborg. "Ayame Burakubaan. SURVIVE!"

  
Raiden paused, closed his mouth, and shrugged his shoulders. "Right," he said. "Well, that answers all of my questions." And, with that, he lifted up his gun, and prepared himself for a fight.


	10. Chapter 10

**Chapter Ten**  
_Kill or be Killed_

  
"This is some bullshit."

  
Willy "For Fuck's Sake, if you Make One More Joke About my Penis Size, I'm Gonna Feed You Your Own Mother" Chambers cackled, as he pulled the big pile of LB Dollars towards him, on the table. "Sucks to be you, Mack," he taunted. "I win again."

  
Mack (and indeed, he had no other name, since nobody cared enough about him to ask him what it really was) threw his head back and sighed. "Come on, Chambers. That's, like, the fifth game in a row."

  
Willy laughed, all the harder. "Motherfucker doesn't even know how to mahjong!"

  
"Man, _nobody_ knows how to mahjong," Lee "Lee" Leeward interjected, without looking away from the screen on which he and his on-again, off-again main rival, Kinda Big Paulie, were currently engaged in a "friendly" game of _Super Blood Fighter 2_.

  
"Yeah," Paulie added. "You only learned how to play that stupid game so you could bilk money out of Mack. Everybody else is playing video games, man. Get with the times!"

  
"Hey, screw you guys!" Willy protested. "Mahjong is a classic! It's a game that was played by, like, Japanese emporers and shit."

  
"The game is Chinese, fool!" Paulie bit back.

  
"What?" Willy fumbled around, grabbing for one of the pieces with the Mandarin characters on them, holding it up like a badge of honor. "You trying to fucking tell me that this shit ain't Japanese?"

  
Lee paused the game, so that he and Paulie could take a good, long look at the tile in Willy's hand. "It's not," Lee said.

  
"Definitely not," Paulie echoed.

  
"That's definitely Chinese, Chambers," even Mack chimed in, before he was forced to dodge Willy's thrown tile, with a yelp.

  
"You don't get to say nothing, fool!" Willy spit, before returning to his haughty smirk. "Motherfucker doesn't even know how to _mahjong_."

  
Lee sighed, pressing the button to resume their game. "I'm still waiting to see how your silly board game is going to help you take on Touchdown, you know."

  
"That's because none of you know how to strategize." Willy contented himself with counting out his LB Dollars, secure in the knowledge that he was at least better than somebody in this room. "Neither does Touchdown, for that matter. I don't think a single motherfucker in the entire UAA knows how to mahjong. And that's how I'm gonna get 'em. I'm gonna out-think the guy. Get around all his fancy wrestling moves and glowy sword tricks."

  
"So, what?" said Mack. "You saying you got a plan, or something?"

  
"Hell yeah, Mack," Wily replied, tapping the side of his head with his finger, significantly. "It's all in here. I've been watching this guy for months, learning his style. His _tactics_. When I finally get my crack at him, I'm gonna be ready for anything he throws at me."

  
"Anything?"

  
"Anything."

  
The word "anything," as it turned out, was the last that he would ever say, before the Schpeltiger blasted in through the window, careened across the living room, and landed directly on top of Willy Chambers and his half of the table. The room then fell completely silent. Well, aside from the rumble of the giant motorcycle, in the room. And the wet gurgles of Willy, somewhere underneath. And the gentle rain of mahjong tiles. And the sudden, raucous, deep-bellied cackles as Mack threw his head back, slapping his knee and stomping his foot.

  
Lee and Paulie sprang to their feet, reaching for bats on either side of the couch, and rushed the Schpeltiger. Travis had just enough time to carefully climb off, find a spot that wasn't occupied by blood or broken bits of wood, glass, or porcelain. He ducked to one side, as Lee came down with his bat, in the same motion drawing and activating his beam katana, the better to slide to Lee's left and slash and slash and slash, until there was nothing of the man left to be considered even remotely threatening.

  
Paulie actually managed to catch Travis on the last swing, knocking his back with a force that made him cough, for a second, but the assassin responded in kind with a quick kick to the man's kinda big chest. Then, while Paulie was reeling, Travis advanced and gave him another. Tossing his beam katana up into the air, Travis lunged forward, wrapping one arm around Paulie's sweaty neck, and hooking the other around the back of his sweaty knee. He lifted Kinda Big Paulie up, flipped him over, and dropped him to the ground directly onto his kinda big, definitely sweaty back. Gravity did the rest, both for the drop, and for the beam katana that came back down, directly into Paulie's chest.

  
Travis fetched his wayward weapon, pointing it in the direction of Mack. Mack, for his part, was still coming down off of the best damn laugh he had gotten, all year. Travis let him have a moment, before asking. "You gonna get up?"

  
Mack finally began to wind down, wiping a tear away and sighing. "Man, _fuck_ no," he replied, amiably. "I got my Crownless King moment, for the day. I'm done. I fucking quit."

  
"You sure? You sure you don't wanna just...?"

  
"No, no, I'm good." Mack looked over to the giant hole in the wall, that used to be a window. Giggling, he pantomimed the action of Travis's motorcycle flying through the air, and coming to an abrupt landing right on top of Willy. "Fucking hell, man. Do you plan these things out, in advance, or do you just do whatever, and hope it all turns out like this?"

  
Travis shook his head. "I leave the planning for the strategy gamers. I'm all about twitch reflexes."

  
"Yeah, yeah, I thought so." Mack sighed. "Fu-cking-hell, man. So, what, you here to just clean up the rest of the little fish?"

  
"Depends. How many more, are there?"

  
"I think I counted about a dozen or so. Most of them are out in the backyard, by the barbecue."

  
"Well, all right." Travis smirked. "Maybe they'll all be a challenge, when they're lumped in, together." He took a few steps towards the backyard, stopping for a moment to motion to Mack. "You're sure you don't want...?"

  
Mack waved the offer away, like one might wave away dessert, when they were on a diet.

  
Travis shrugged. "Your funeral, I guess." He carefully stepped over a piece of Lee, as he made his way down the hall.

  
***      *      ***

  
"...but all they did was take the stills from the original book, and apply a bunch of shitty tweens to them! I mean, can you believe it?!"

  
"Oh, my fucking God, Hammond!" Ricky "the Community Service Guy" Sterling looked up from the grill, closing his eyes and summoning all his will not to smack the man next to him with the greasy spatula, in his hand. "Nobody fucking cares about the animation quality of the hentai you watch!"

  
"Hey, man, fuck you!" cried Creepy Hammond. "I'm just trying to make conversation, here."

  
"Yeah, well you're trying to make conversation about your shitty taste in hentai, while I'm trying to make food!"

  
Hammond scoffed. "I should have figured you wouldn't understand. Fucking prude."

  
"Prudishness," Ricky insisted, "has nothing to do with it."

  
"Nah, it's got everything to do with it!"

  
"It does not!"

  
"Does so!"

  
"Fucking A, man!" Pete, the resident grizzled old mercenary (which, in Santa Destroy, usually placed people as being in their early thirties), decided that now might be a good time to step in between Ricky and Hammond, like one might step in between a pair of hissing cats. "Hammond, buddy, you can't really believe that."

  
Hammond huffed, folding his arms and pouting at the air in the opposite direction. "Maybe I do," he sneered. "People around here are still acting like we live in the Victorian era, or something. News flash, folks: it's the twenty-first century, and people can like whatever they want!"

  
Pete and Ricky exchanged glances, the latter making a motion with his hand reminiscent of certain less than wholesome, male-centric activities, before the former took a step forward and wrapped an arm around Hammond's shoulder. "Hammond," he crowed, chummily. "Ham-Ham. Listen, buddy. I get it, right? Hentai's this weird little niche, you've found, and it works for you. It _works_ for you. But, you heard on the internet and whatever that people treat hentai afficionados like shit, and so you're just waiting for somebody to give you shit for it. But, look around you, man." He made a motion with his free arm, encompassing the entire party, before pointing off to one man, in particular. "Stanley, there, writes erotic fanfiction of the other UAA members, in his spare time."

  
"Yup," Stanley responded.

  
Nodding, Pete pointed to someone else. "Hex, over there? That man runs a service, dominating bored, middle-aged housewives who read one too many BDSM books."

  
"Yo," Hex replied, not looking up from his phone.

  
"Fucking hell," Pete craned his arm, to pick somebody out, who was standing near the door. "The smart money says that Orson, over there, is wearing women's underwear, right the fuck now."

  
"They make me feel powerful!" cried Orson, with a beaming grin.

  
"Wow," said Creepy Hammond, shaking his head. "I had no idea that everyone, here, had such a nuanced and complicated sex life."

  
"Well, sure they do!" Letting Hammond go, Pete made a broad, world-hugging gesture with his arms. "Everybody does! That's what makes life so fun and interesting. We just don't really talk about it, is all."

  
"But why not?"

  
"Because, Hammond, the thing you have to realize is that fetishes are only fun when everyone involved is aware, and more importantly, willing. Nobody wants to be part of something, without their consent."

  
"Well, shit." Hammond put his hands on his hips and nodded, emphatically. "Now I know! Thanks, Pete, for opening my eyes to the true meaning of sex-positivity!"

  
"No problem!" Pete replied, clenching a fist in dramatic gesture. "That's just what friends do!"

  
"Let's do a jump for friendship!" someone cried.

  
As one, the gathered assassins all did a leap into the air, with a glorious shout of "Friendship!"

  
As his feet hit the ground, Orson said "Hey guys. On a completely unrelated note, did anybody hear a sound like a motorcycle crashing through the front of the building, and some of our guys being brutally slaughtered by..."

  
That was the last thing he said, before he was sliced head to silky crotch by Travis Touchdown's beam katana.


	11. Chapter 11

**Chapter Eleven**   
_Cool Blue Flag_

  
Raiden pulled the trigger, aiming for the school girl's shoulder. However, she was off, even before he had begun flexing his finger, skittering away into the darkness with nothing but the flash of lead on something metal to mark her passing. The cyborg grit his teeth, straining his ears to try and follow the sound of her footsteps. It was, admittedly, rather hard to do, especially when his Codec suddenly found itself going off, in his ear.

  
The null entry appeared, in his AR display, seemingly unable to even wait for him to pick up. It growl-gurgled something important sounding.

  
"What?" Raiden pointed his gun left and right, taking a cautious step back. "What do you mean, 'the Akashic Point is warping?'"

  
The null entry began to explain, in complex detail, about the bizarre tendency of the Akashic Point to change things, warp them into something wholly unfamiliar and strange.

  
"Dammit!" Raiden growled. "Make sense!"

  
He rolled out of the way, as the faint silhouette of the woman appeared, out of the corner of his eye, and a spray of bullets followed her. She fired in a constant stream, before vanishing, once again, into the shadows. Raiden came back up in time to send a couple of rounds chasing after her.

  
She appeared on his other side. Raiden managed to catch her, this time, wheeling around and putting a shot right in her heart. She paused, exploded into multi-colored foam, and circled around the cyborg. He thought, for a moment, that he might have won, until the foam sailed past him, gathered together under a spotlight, and reformed. When she came back together, she looked different; her outfit had suddenly turned blue and white, and she now held two automatic rifles, one in each hand.

  
She leapt into the air, backflipping into the shadows and sending a spray of bullets after Raiden, as she went. Raiden only managed to get out of the way by a narrow margin, saved by the haphazard nature of the weapons' firing, more than by his own reflexes. Thinking quickly, he reached into his tactical pouch, producing a small grenade, which he sent rolling out onto the floor.

  
Suddenly, the air was filled with a dense cloud of smoke. He slipped away to the side, stepping onto the old floorboards as quietly as his cybernetics would allow, as he scanned the room. The smoke would foil normal senses, but to his AR headset... sure enough, there was Ayame, stumbling around blindly. He took aim, and fired.

  
Ayame turned into foam, once again. As she did so, however, the lights decided that now would be the time to go out, completely. Even with his headset, nothing but darkness stretched out before him, in all directions. He wheeled his head around, nervously reloading as he tried to find the faintest hint of his enemy. No sooner had he snapped the new clip into place, however, than he was greeted with the large mechanical thunk of one of the lights snapping back to life.

  
Raiden lifted his gun at the figure in the center of the light, then relaxed his arms just a fraction, as he took in the sight in front of him. Ayame's large head had suddenly gotten the addition of an equally large helmet. Her entire outfit had made the shift from "kinda punkish anime schoolgirl" to "I don't know... something faux retro future, maybe?" It still had the same beats; skirt, thigh-high boots, akimbo guns. The guns had changed to something between a laser and a blowdryer, though. At least they looked like something you might actually wield in one hand, so that was something.

  
"JUST GO FOR IT!" Ayame cried, in a voice still clearly unused to English, before her helmet snapped a visor and a face mask down over the rest of her freakish anime head.

  
Raiden took a deep breath, and then let his head fall to one side, his mouth open in confusion and fatigue.

  
He snapped back to attention, as Ayame charged. Quickly, he fired off three shots, in rapid succession, only to watch as the former schoolgirl spun and contorted out of their path, as she ran, with a fluidity that could only make sense if she could see the bullets fly in slow-motion. She whipped around, at the last one, and came in with a spinning kick. Raiden got his arms up to parry her leg, swatting it aside again when she came in to try and dig her heel into his chest. He tried a punch of his own, but only succeeded in hitting air.

  
He had only a split second to notice that one of the guns in Ayame's hand had been replaced with something that he swore was a cheerleader's pom-pom, before he felt it, and the fist behind it, connect with his chin. Then, for some reason, he felt it connect again, a moment later. And then, for a third time, he felt that pom-pom and fist dig into his chin. Then, violently, he found himself being launched into the air, chin-first.

  
He had no idea that a body could be launched this high, and still remain attached to itself. By the time he managed to come back to his senses, and turn his body to face the ground, Ayame was little more than a blue dot, in the distance. Raiden squinted, when the little blue dot became just the slightest bit brighter. His eyes widened right back out, however, when he realized that the reason for that was the sheer volume of glowing blue and pink bolts of energy that were headed his way.  
Raiden swung his body to one side, sailing past the initial volley. He twisted and contorted to cut through the stream, as it reacquired him, in mid-air. He felt the heat as blue-hot plasma grazed past his arms, his legs, his back and torso. One shot glanced off his chin; some part of him thought he could see a spinning, heart shaped core inside the beam.

  
Finally, he broke away from the mass of lasers, in the same way one might break away from a raging river. Still spinning, he reached into his pouch and found Dystopia, Monsoon's HF sai. Thinking quickly, he swung at an approaching bolt, swatting it aside like a baseball. He grinned at the weapon, and its crackling nimbus of electrical energy, with the same boyish triumph as before. "Lorentz Force!"

  
Galvanized, Raiden's hand was a blur of motion, as he pointed his body straight down and began warding off shot after shot with his sai. He waited until he was just about as fast as he was going to get, and as close as he needed to be, before he swung to one side, reared his hand back, and threw Dystopia straight down. Ayame was clearly confused, when it latched on to her arm and decided to stay there, but once Raiden pulled back, dragging her into the air with him, things were no doubt made clear.

  
Raiden turned himself around, angled one foot down, and activated his jet boosters.

  
Ayame turned _herself_ around, angled a foot _up,_ and cried "Kuru Buuru Kikku!"

  
High-heel arch locked with improbable high-heel arch, in mid air. Raiden grit his teeth, pulling on the energy leash between his hand and the sai, trying his hardest to overpower his opponent, or at least stall until she could hit the ground, first. But then, something unusual happened. It felt, suddenly, like the world around him got very small, very closed in. In a move that seemed way too awesome to be practical, Ayame suddenly began to spin her legs, parrying Raiden's kick with the first, before landing a whipping toe to his side with the second. And then Raiden felt that boot toe connect with him a second time. And then a third.

  
He flew off to the side, hitting the ground with enough force to bounce and roll across the floorboards. Raiden groaned, struggling to pull himself to his feet. He winced, as a series of small energy bolts rained on his chest, but by the time he could raise his gun, Ayame had skittered off into the darkness. She emerged again, to his left, running full tilt and firing as she went. Raiden barely had time to wave her attack away with Dystopia, before she was gone again. He tried to throw the sai at her, again, but she was long gone by the time it could cross the distance. He flinched to one side, thinking himself under attack...

  
...and then he saw Dystopia come back to his hand in a way he hadn't anticipated. Having moved the hand attached to the weapon by its energy leash, he thought it would just make a straight line back to his hand. Instead, it seemed to follow his hand, arcing out to the side as it came back in sort of a lazy circle. He stared at it, for a second, as he processed this new information. Then, suddenly, he had an idea.

  
When Ayame began to run along his flank, once again, Raiden tossed Dystopia ahead of her, rotating his body as he did so, so that the weapon cut a wide circle, directly in the path of her flight. She spun and contorted her body, dodging the weapon with that same, impossible grace. But that didn't matter, because what mattered was that she finally stopped moving.

  
Raiden caught the weapon and sent it out again, the other way. Again she dodged. He pulled up his gun and fired off one, two, three shots. Once, twice, thrice she danced out of the way. He caught and released Dystopia, bringing the leash down like a high-energy whip. Nothing. He fired.

  
Just as the last bullet grazed harmlessly past her, Ayame changed. Her outfit disappeared, replaced once again with her "regular" schoolgirl outfit. Without even bothering to think about what that might mean, Raiden threw Dystopia one more time, hooking it onto the front of her sweater and hurling her straight up into the air, before taking off in pursuit.

  
When he activated his electrolytes, put his processors into overclock, he saw one, two, three... five glowing spots, just like the ones on those creatures in the hallways. As he closed the distance, with time seeming to move at a snail's pace, he rested his gun-arm onto his other forearm and took careful aim, plugging one after another with a single, expertly placed shot. Then, for good measure, he turned around and activated his jet boosters, once more, digging his heel directly into the woman's chest.

  
A terrible crash, followed by sunlight and roaring winds greeted them, as Raiden pushed the two of them up and through the roof of the old gymnasium. As they flew through the air, he saw his Codec come to life, in his AR display.

  
 _I don't understand,_ Ayame's voice said to him, in crisp, overly formal Japanese. _I thought I could finally have a chance to cleanse this carnal and impure world, once I became one with the Heavens. Ninja-kun... you must promise to do what I cannot. Bring justice to the lawless, and stop the spread of demons, in this world._

  
"I don't know what you're talking about," Raiden shouted, over the wind, "but I'll do what I can to fix things, in this town."

  
 _I am glad._ Raiden thought he saw tears, leaking out from under the bottom of the obvious mask. _My one regret was not getting to die at the hands of Tiger-beast-kun. I heard he would have been gentle..._

  
The Codec call cut out, and a half-moment later Ayame exploded into multi-colored foam, forming around Raiden's body and melding into his cybernetic skin. He felt his wounds close up, felt his pain receptors die down, completely. Yet, he also felt somehow... different. Better. Changed. He tried to ponder, for a moment, what could have caused such a thing to happen, to a body comprised almost entirely of mechanical hardware.

  
Of course, he only had a moment, because afterwards he was keenly aware of the fact that he was a great distance in the air, and his trajectory was set to land him smack dab in the nearby ocean.


	12. Chapter 12

**Chapter Twelve**   
_Uh...um...yeah, overworld thing again._

  
Jimmy slipped, bracing himself against the doorway into the backyard, before he collapsed entirely. He tried not to think about what, exactly he had slipped on, but considering the carnage, all over the yard, it was pretty hard to ignore. He settled for trying not to look like he was about to lose his lunch. He failed, pretty miserably. "H-hey, Travis!" he cried, taking a breath and muttering to himself "Geez, Louise, that's a lot of blood."

  
Travis looked up from the still spluttering remains of Pete. The two assassins exchanged glances, awkwardly. Not because they acknowledged the loss of life and the egregious crime, in front of them. Or at least, not _bilaterally_ because of that. Mostly, it had to do with Travis's outfit. At some point, during what had to be a terrible fight, Travis had somehow lost his jacket and shirt, gained a pair of tight, spandex pants and boots, painted himself in tiger stripes, and donned an orange and black mask, reminiscent of _lucha libre_ wrestlers. Travis deactivated his beam katana, with a look like Jimmy had just walked in on the aftermath of a particularly shameful masturbation session.

  
Jimmy pointed to Travis's mask. "Why... what's with...?"

  
"It happens, sometimes," Travis explained. "Used to be, I turned into a tiger, but... you know, budget constraints. It'll wear off, in a moment."

  
Jimmy mouthed a wordless question, to pretty much every aspect of that explanation. Before he could properly articulate a more specific one, however, Travis suddenly began to shine, flaring strongly enough to dazzle Jimmy. By the time he could open his eyes again, he found Travis standing where he had been, this time dressed like he had been, when he left Laundry Suplex. He decided, for the sake of his own safety and sanity, not to press the issue, after that.

  
"So," Jimmy muttered, "you, uh... you really did it. You really just... just killed them all."

  
"Happy to be of service," Travis responded, grinning wolfishly as he slipped his weapon back onto his belt. "Now, then, about my payment."

  
"R-right." Jimmy took a deep breath, and began the process of crossing the yard. He tried to step gingerly over pieces of people, tried to remind himself that they weren't, at one point, living human beings. He failed at both of these things. "Oh, Golly," he moaned, "how many people did you fight? I can't even count them; they all are just... I can't identify which pieces are... was that guy wearing panties? That's... I mean, good for him, even if he's dead or... oh, Sweet Baby Handbags, this is going to be all over the news..."

  
By the time he got up to Travis, he was as pale as the kinds of sheets they'd use in a world occupied by cheap Haloween ghosts. Travis stared down at the man, and his sick little puppy dog eyes, trying really hard to be patient and understanding. Not because he wasn't a half a second off of losing his patience, but because he thought being the patient, understanding type made him seem cooler.

  
"Okay..." Jimmy reached into his pocket, producing his phone. "So, the lady you're looking for is Ayame Blackburn."

  
"Ayame?" Travis felt a spot of hope, in the back of his mind. "Who's she? Another ninja school girl?"

  
"She's an assassin," Jimmy explained. "Or, she was. You see, she was actually ki..."

  
When Jimmy unlocked his phone screen, the first thing to appear was a photo. To describe the things taking place in this photo would change the fanfiction from a "Mature" to an "Adults Only," and the author is not in any way willing to go through that much effort, especially for such a trivial thing. Suffice it to say that the photo contained a woman, and it contained a man, and even though the man's face was not in the shot, even a cursory examination would determine that this man and the man holding the phone were two completely different men. A caption at the bottom read "thinking of you, babe," and had a line of incredibly suggestive emojis.

  
Jimmy frantically swiped his fingers across the screen, trying to remove the image and pull up the thing he was actually trying to show Travis. "A-anyway..." He found a photograph of a young lady in a schoolgirl outfit, with an oversized anime head. "Ayame used to be an assassin, until she was killed, at the hands of the Killer Seven."

  
"Wait," Travis interjected, simultaneously trying to ignore the other thing he was made to see. "If she was killed, how is she part of the...?"

  
"Akashic Point."

  
"Oh. Right."

  
"Apparently, she's American. Ayame isn't even her real name; she was kidnapped and brainwashed in order to become part of some Japanese nationalist plot, or something." Jimmy swiped to show a second photo of the girl, from a different angle. "She shouldn't be a big deal for an expert assassin, but from what I've heard, the Akashic Point does strange things to spirits, caught in them. It's hard to get a handle on just what she might be capable of, even if I could have found anything on how she used to operate, before she died."

  
Travis rubbed his chin, thoughtfully. "I'm not normally one to fight women, especially..." he raised an eyebrow, wondering to himself about whether he really ought to go where he was about to go. He decided to just let it go, and worry about it, when it came up. "All right. So, do you know where I can find this girl?"

  
"The Akashic Point is at Santa Destroy Junior High." Jimmy swiped once again, and then quickly again when the photo on screen turned out to be a second picture in the vein of the very first. He held the phone to give Travis a better view of the old school entrance. "It moved there after that whole business with the mascot costumes and Pizza Day."

  
Travis grimaced. He remembered that incident, all too well. The scars ran deep and wide, across the whole of Santa Destroy, and it seemed like everywhere he looked, he could find evidence of its effects on the common people. "I can see why that would be," he muttered.

  
"Yeah," Jimmy said.

  
The two of them took a moment to acknowledge the ground, morosely.

  
Then, Travis nodded his head, with newfound resolve. "All right. Guess I've got a fight to go get ready for. Thanks for the tip, Jackie."

  
"It's, um..." Jimmy started, before losing his nerve, and letting the point slide. "...um, no problem, Mr. Touchdown. Let me know if I can help you any more. Maybe we could, um, make an arrangement or something."

  
He made the last statement to Travis's back, as the assassin began to leave with all the circumstance of a bored man in a completely empty room. Travis kicked aside a piece of someone who might or might not have been Ricky, allowing him to open the gate to the side yard and walk around to the front of the house. He looked around, confused, before awkwardly realizing that he had left the Schpeltiger inside the living room.

  
Getting it back out, again, was a pain in the ass. Travis was glad that the cackling assassin was nowhere to be seen, lest the awkward K-turn he was forced to pull along debris and blood covered hardwood floors, with all the mess that entailed, in any way ruin the Crownless King moment he had previously earned. If that didn't do it, the slow, awkward fall out of the front window, which caused him to crash down front-first far enough to almost make him roll upside-down, certainly would have done the trick. Once he had managed to right himself, he decided it was best to just leave a patch of torn up lawns, and put as much distance as was prudent between himself and his exit.

  
Tearing down the street, Travis found himself breaking out into an antsy smile. This was it, he told himself. Preacher was an unfortunate speed bump, but now he's looking at a proper shortcut, to get to the top. He'd need to work fast, if he was going to capitalize on this information before Sylvia found out. For a moment, he thought he might be able to swing by the gym, get himself good and pumped for the fight (as grueling exercise often did, paradoxically, for a man of his boundless energy). He shook the idea away. The iron was hot, and just because Travis was going to strike it with hot plasma didn't mean he wasn't obligated to strike quickly. He jackknifed around a corner, making a beeline for the overpass.

  
Maybe a minute and a half en-route, as he was threading through a handful of cars that had the audacity to only be going five miles per hour over the speed limit, he felt a buzz in his pocket. He fished out his phone, steering the Schpeltiger with his other hand in a way that kept the wild swerving to a minimum, and put it to his ear.

  
"Allo, Travis?" said the woman on the other side of the call.

  
"Sylvia!" he shouted, over the wind and the engine and the squeal of tires. "What's up?"

  
"I am calling to inform you that you are now officially ranked number forty-nine," said Sylvia. "Apparently, somebody has eliminated the assassin ahead of you, so we have to move you ahead, in the rankings."

  
"Well, that's good," Travis replied, before the full implications of the statement could register. "Wait a minute. You said the assassin ahead of me? Like, _directly_ ahead of me?"

  
"Yes. The target's name was Ayame Blackburn. We were actually waiting for your payment, and compiling the data, before we heard the news. Congratulations, Travis. Looks like you're that much closer to the top."

  
Travis couldn't answer. Another conscientious driver forced him to make a turn, one handed on a motorcycle. He overshot, overcompensated, spun completely around, and finally came to a stop against a highway divide, with enough force to nearly throw him from the seat.

  
"Travis? Allo?"

  
The assassin shifted himself, so that he was once again properly in the seat, put the phone back to his ear, and scowled into the middle distance. "Who killed her?"

  
"I cannot reveal that information," Sylvia responded.

  
"It was the robot guy, wasn't it?"

  
The pause that followed spoke volumes. She finally responded by repeating "I cannot reveal that information."

  
"Well, thanks for the heads up," Travis said, trying his best to sound polite. "I don't suppose the money I've put up for the forty-ninth's info can roll over to number forty-eight?"

  
He heard a click, on the other end, followed by a dial tone. Travis nodded, in understanding, before hanging up and methodically slipping the phone back into his pocket. Then, he put both hands on the handlebars, gunned the engine, and took off with enough force to throw his front wheel straight up into the air. He tore down the highway, this time directly into oncoming traffic. Cars swerved left and right to get out of his way; he barely even twitched to avoid them.

  
Back on the overpass entrance, he skidded to the right with enough force to leave a patch of rubber, a broken street light, and a pit maneuvered car trying to cross in his wake. Then, pressing his thumb down on a button in the throttle, he blasted off on his new heading with renewed energy.

  
A great many things were broken, between when he started, and when he ended up at the gym. Trees, street lamps, cars, coconut vendor stalls, noise ordinances (if, indeed, Santa Destroy could ever have a level of civilization that would allow noise ordinances), even the rules of public decency at one point when, in a fit of pique, Travis decided to give a few passerby a gesture that the author will not deign to describe in too much detail, out of a fear it might damage his audience's delicate sensibilites.

  
Fortunately (for Travis, at least), the trip had done quite a bit to clear his head. He felt a lot less like he was about to drop everything he was doing to go on a revenge spree, and more like he was ready to channel his anger and frustration into something actually potentially worthwhile. Overall, he considered it to be a very healthy thing, he did, and he gave himself a little pat on the back for not losing control.

  
On the other side of the big glass door, Travis could see the vague outline of someone, just standing there. As he swung a leg off of the Schpeltiger, he stared at the figure, as it stood, with half its body obscured behind the doorframe, poking its head out, quizzically. A hand pressed up against the glass, a small, dainty, pale thing that bore just the slightest hint of a flush. Travis tilted his head, worked a kink out of his neck that may or may not have been mild whiplash. The hand's fingers curled inward, nails scratching against the glass. Then, it reached over, turning the "Closed" sign on the door to the side that read "Open," before it and the body attached to it vanished into the building.

  
Without a moment's thought, about the situation, Travis marched on ahead and stepped inside.


	13. Chapter 13

**Chapter Thirteen**   
_Why'd I Even Start This Naming Convention Thing? It's Not Like I'm Writing a Boss Rush or Anything, and There's Only So Many Times I Can Be Like "Normal Theme Song Plays Here."_

  
Raiden clawed his way onto the beach, coughing and spluttering as he struggled to his feet. As it turned out, enhanced cybernetic strength was certainly a boon, when it came to swimming, but the weight of CNT fiber and military hardware balanced it out, just a bit. Also, robotic high heels were not nearly as effective as fins for kicking. Raiden decided to use all of those excuses, rather than the more laconic explanation that he had been massively out of practice, ever since replacing his entire body with muscle fiber, and turning himself into a walking tank.

  
The chime of his Codec greeted him, as soon as he was free of the surf. Distractedly, he tapped at his earlobe. "Raiden," he announced.

  
"Raiden!" Kevin's face appeared in his AR display. "Is everything okay? I tried calling you, but it's like you dropped off the map."

  
"Everything's fine," Raiden replied. "I went to the school and..." he thought for a second, before deciding against describing the things he went through, exactly at they happened. "...I was ambushed. They scrambled Codec calls and radar, but I took care of them."

  
"Who're 'they?'" Kevin asked.

 

"That's what I'm going to find out." Someone was further down the beach, Raiden squinted, as he spoke. "Can I ask you to run a name, for me?"

  
"Uh, hold on..." Kevin leaned over, and Raiden could hear the clack of keys. "Okay, so as long as it's not classified, I should be able to find them without having to go over Boris's head. Who am I looking for?"

  
"Travis... Touchdown."

 

"You mean, 'Touchdown,' like in football?"

  
"Or like the landing of an aircraft."

  
"Are you sure that's not an alias, or something?"

  
"No, but you might as well run it through known aliases, just to be safe."

  
"Can do. Let's see, here..." Kevin pursed his lips, as he stared at the section of his computer screen that wasn't occupied with the Codec call. "I've got one hit, in the Santa Destroy area. This your guy?"

  
Raiden watched as a photograph materialized to the side of Kevin's face. "Yeah, that's him," he confirmed. "I recognize the shades. What are we dealing with, here?"

  
Kevin squinted. "Says here, the man's an assassin. Completely off the radar, until he joined the UAA, in 2008. No prior arrests, but a long list of traffic violations related to reckless driving and expired licenses. How he went from being just a bad driver to becoming a hired killer, is anyone's guess."

  
"What's his background?" Raiden asked. "Special Forces? Private contractors? Maybe he used to have a hit on the XIFF, before the SOP program went offline."

  
"No, I'm not getting anything, here." Kevin leaned back, in his seat, throwing up his hands. "If the man's got military training, it's not in this database."

  
"That can't be right," Raiden insisted. "He went toe-to-toe with me, without any cybernetics or even an exosuit. There's got to be something we're missing."

  
"I can try and dig deeper," Kevin said, "but I'm gonna have to run it by Boris, first. It's not like I can just hand you our deep data, especially since you don't officially work for Maverick, anymore."

  
Raiden shook his head. "Never mind. I don't want to put you in any kind of hot water. If I need to know, I'll ask Boris, myself. In the meantime, I've still got searching, to do."

  
"I take it, you didn't find Bladewolf, then."

  
"No. He wasn't at the school."

  
"That's not good." Kevin folded his hands, worriedly, before making an effort to shrug it off. "I'm sure he'll turn up, eventually. I've got his frequency, on standby, in case he resurfaces."

  
"Thanks, Kevin."

  
"Hey, man, it's no problem. Take care of yourself, out there."

  
When he hung up, Raiden found his attention momentarily diverted to the figure in the distance, who was struggling to walk back up the hill with two armfuls of coconuts, in a way that suggested that their body was in no way built for such an action. He stared at it for just long enough to wonder who would wear a trench coat to the beach, before an idea struck him. He turned, so that the figure was safely in his peripheral vision, and pressed his finger to his ear, once again.

  
_Churrip, churrip... churrip, churrip..._

  
A man answered the call, a thin, balding wisp of a man in a dress shirt and bolo tie. "Raiden?" the man said, in a crisp German accent. "Is that you?"

  
"Long time, no see, Doc." Raiden smirked. "How's the research going? Still out collecting left hands?"

  
"Oh, heavens no," Doktor chuckled. "The PMCs caught on, you see. Now they store combat data in multiple caches, to mitigate collection. Besides, there's nobody around who could harvest the data with the same efficiency as you."

  
"What can I say? I was built to purpose."

  
"Indeed. Indeed. Now then..." Doktor laced his fingers together, in front of him, as he leaned onto his desk. "...I don't suppose you called merely to chat. Is something the matter?"

  
Raiden winced. "I'm not sure. Do you still have access to my body's diagnostic programs?"

  
"Of course. They've been offline, ever since you broke ties with Maverick, but as your doctor, it would be remiss of me, not to keep them ready to go, at a moment's notice." Doktor pushed himself off of the desk, rolling his chair to another monitor, off to the side. "Have you been experiencing any kind of malfunctions?"

  
"That's..." Raiden glanced over to the trench coat wearing stranger, in the distance. Self-conscious, he turned a little further, in case it turned out the stranger could read lips. "That's not the problem. Recently, I've come into contact with some kind of... foreign matter. I think it's affecting my systems, but I'm not sure how."

  
"Foreign matter? What kind of foreign matter?"

  
Raiden felt the faintest urge to maybe find someplace covered, or at least shaded, while he talked private information with his doctor. He knew it was silly, but... "Again, I'm not sure. It could be some kind of nanomachines. They seem to have repaired some damage, I took, and they're not otherwise interfering, but..."

  
Doktor nodded, engrossed in the data readouts on his screen. "...but you figured it would be best to confirm it, in case it turns out to be a hindrance, later on down the line. A wise decision. You should get a notification, that the scan is beginning."

  
He settled for a spot, behind a palm tree, as he watched systems work, in his AR display. He folded his arms, and tried not to fidget, too much. He knew, from experience, that the process didn't actually involve any kind of physical feedback, that any sensations he felt were completely in his head, but no matter what, every time it happened, he always got shivers. It felt like he was being poked and prodded at, from a hundred different angles.

  
Finally, he heard Doktor say "It is done. Now then, let us take a good look at this foreign substance..." He rubbed at his lips, thoughtfully with his thumb and forefinger, as the data came in to him. "Hmm... this is a fascinating development. Apparently, there is an excess of organic matter, in your system."

  
"Organic?" Raiden parroted, nervously. "What does that mean, organic?"

  
"I would have to have you here, to analyze the cells in person," Doktor explained, "but from what I'm seeing here, it looks like the system is detecting platelets in your muscle fibers, as well as a heightened concentration of iron."

  
"Platelets? Iron? Are you saying there's... _blood_ in my system?"

  
"It seems rather unlikely," Doktor admitted, "but that is what the screen, here, is telling me. It is rather unusual, I must admit; I should have thought your internal nanomachines would have dealt with contaminants such as these, and purged them out of your system."

  
Raiden felt a sudden, powerful urge to look behind him. When he did, he saw the man in the trench coat, awkwardly hovering near a fallen coconut, in the sand. Raiden looked from the man, to the coconut, and back to the man. "Um... do you mind?" he asked. "I'm trying to have a private conversation, here."

  
With an awkward, apologetic warble, the man bent over, grabbed the coconut, and began shuffling away with the gait of one trying to walk on their hands.

  
Raiden, relieved as he was, paid it no heed as he turned his attention back to Doktor. "So, what do you think? Is it anything I should be concerned about?"

  
"Hmm..." Doktor rubbed his chin, thoughtfully. "Simple organic matter should pose no threat. Certainly, you do not have to worry about the risk of infections, since your brain and other organic tissue is safely partitioned from your muscle fiber. However, I cannot say for certain what sort of effect this material will have, on your body, until I've gotten a proper look at it. I would recommend a full workup and diagnosis, in person, as soon as possible."

  
Raiden shook his head. "That's going to have to wait, Doc. I have important things to do here and now."

  
"Yes, I was worried you were going to say that," Doktor sighed. "Still, at least the remote diagnostics are operational. I shall monitor your condition, as closely as I can, and keep you informed if the system detects any changes or further abnormalities."

  
"Got it. Thanks, Doc."

  
They ended the call without too much more ceremony, deciding to let each other get back to their own work. Raiden tried to push the matter of the blood in his system out of his mind, for the moment, and try to figure out what he could still do.

Obviously, there were still two Akashic Points he could have checked out, but considering the dangers he went through, the last time... he shook his head. What mattered was finding Bladewolf, wherever he had gotten to.

  
Another call came in, as he pondered. When he pressed his finger to his earlobe, Kevin appeared on screen, once again. "Hey, Raiden."

  
"What's up, Kevin?"

  
"This Touchdown guy... any chance you're trying to figure out where he is?"

  
Raiden paused for a second, digesting the idea, before he spoke. "Not really, but now that you mention it, it might be useful."

  
Kevin nodded. "Well, I found a list of his usual haunts, and crossed referenced it with any recent calls about a man on a motorcycle, driving recklessly. I think, right now, you can find him at Viola's Gym, back in town."

  
"A gym?" Raiden smirked. "Guess even an untrained assassin needs to keep in shape, somehow."

  
"Apparently," Kevin added, "he's been a card carrying member for a long time. Stuck with it, even through two changes in management. Turns out the previous two owners died, in UAA related incidents. Watch yourself, if you're headed there."

  
"You don't have to tell me twice," Raiden replied. "Don't worry. I've gotten the message pretty clear, that it pays to be cautious, around here."

  
And so, for the final time, at least for now, Raiden hung up on his former coworker. His course firmly set, he turned on his prominent heel and made his way towards land proper. He had to get his bearings, for a minute, when he realized he had flown quite a significant distance from where he had parked his motorcycle. Fortunately, if swimming was a bit of a challenge, in this body, at least he could still get a decent clip when he ran, much to the confusion of the people he joined in highway traffic.


	14. Chapter 14

**Chapter Fourteen**   
_Oh, no wait. I got one. "Sun-baked Steel." That's the gym theme, now. Fuck, no. I'm sorry. I'm really tired, right now._

  
There wasn't a whole lot that could be said about Viola's Gym. It looked like a gym. It looked like a gym that hadn't changed its equipment, layout, furniture or overall presentation in a couple of decades, but most curiously it didn't have that... very specific smell, typical of older gyms. That smell that may or may not partially be sweat, but since you're in a gym, your brain wants you to _think_ that's what it is. _That_ smell. That wasn't there. Instead, Viola's Gym smelled of other things. Raiden found himself hard-pressed to describe it; sort of a mixture between general rough living and extended desperation, with maybe the faintest hint of old gym smell, though that might have just _actually_ been sweat. The cyborg couldn't tell if such a thing was especially noteworthy, or if it just stood out because of how otherwise completely nondescript the place was.

  
When he made his way to the area, where he could see Travis doing squats (in jeans and a jacket, for some inexplicable reason), Raiden was aware that eyes were on him. Well, eyes other than the one belonging to the scowling, squatting assassin, who thankfully wasn't letting the cyborg's presence interrupt his set. When he turned his head to the right, Raiden could see about half the body of a young lady, peering out from around a corner that, presumably, led into an office. She certainly wasn't dressed for the gym, in her offensively conservative black dress and soda-bottle glasses, and even with a cursory examination he could tell that this woman was a complete stranger to any kind of strength training.

  
She stared at Raiden, at the both of them, with an intensity bordering on overwhelming, a sheer unstoppable focus that radiated out from her like heat from the open door of a furnace. Raiden could see marks, where her nails had slowly tore their way down the wall, in their quest to ball into a fist. And yet, there was no malice, in her expression. It was certainly predatory, that much Raiden could easily identify, but beyond that he could detect nothing but the raw, relentless force of will, in her stare. Or, at least, he really didn't want to detect anything else, lest he look too closely at the way she was distractedly rubbing her thighs together, and get an incredibly uncomfortable interpretation.

  
"She's been standing there, ever since I came in," Travis grunted out, in between reps. "Just ignore her."

  
"Right." Raiden didn't expect Travis to be a source of wisdom, but in this case, he was willing to follow his advice. He turned to face the assassin. "I've been looking for you, Touchdown."

  
"No shit." Travis's brow furrowed deeper, as much as his squats deepened. "Finally decided to climb up the ranks in the proper order, or did you get lost on your way here, and decide to just hit number forty-nine, instead?"

  
Raiden raised an eyebrow, and then Travis's meaning kicked in. "You're talking about Blackburn. I'm not after your kills, Travis. I'm not even part of this UAA thing."

  
Travis huffed, and began to squat with even more enthusiasm. Raiden didn't even know an unaugmented man could have that much power, locked away in his glutes.

  
"Travis," Raiden continued, "listen to me. The UAA... what is it? Are you some kind of PMC group?"

  
"PMC?" Travis scoffed. "Do I look like a jarhead, to you? I'm an assassin, old man."

  
"I am not..." Raiden spat out, before he caught himself and said "You are not an assassin. I've checked your record; you haven't been involved with any incidents, involving dignitaries or high-ranking officials. As far as I can tell, the only people you've murdered were members of your own organization."

  
"Well, to be fair," Travis interjected, "I did murder the CEO of Pizza Bat. And then his son. Who became the CEO of Pizza Bat. So, I've killed the CEO of Pizza Bat, twice."

  
"Pizza what?"

  
"No, not Pizza Butt. Pizza Bat. 'Butt' was this weird phase the company went through in 2008."

  
Raiden's jaw worked, but no pertinent questions about what was just said came out of his mouth. Eventually he shook his head and dropped the subject. "The point is, if you're an assassin, a PMC, whatever, you're a sword for hire."

  
"That's right."

  
"Can I hire you?"

  
Travis stopped, in mid-squat, staring up at the cyborg with an eye that couldn't have stunk more if it was being made by an incontinent skunk. "Come again?" he asked.

  
"You know this town better than I do," Raiden explained, "and you know the inner workings of the UAA. If I'm going to get to the bottom of what they've got planned, it'd help to have someone on my side."

  
"Not gonna happen," Travis gruffed, as he resumed his set. He maintained eye contact through every motion of his squats. "I don't really do the whole 'having a boss' thing. I'm an independent soul, my own man, you got that?"

  
Raiden set his jaw. "Do you... even know what an assassin _is_ , Mister Touchdown?"

  
In defiance of all that seemed possible, Travis's expression managed to find a new level of sour to reach. "Give me one good reason why I should help you with anything," he growled.

  
"I'll give you three." Raiden leaned against a rack of weights, folding his arms as he spoke. "First off, I'm not interested in whatever blood sport you've got going on, here. The UAA has something that they shouldn't have, and the sooner I can take it from them, the less I'm going to be interfering with your little climb to the top."

 

Travis made an effort to pretend as though that wasn't exactly what he wanted. The strain of working his glutes did a passable job of masking it.

  
"Second," the cyborg continued, "I have contacts all over the place, and information on this organization well beyond what you know. I could find out who number one is, and then you could win this competition, no problem."

  
That was a bit harder to mask, at least as far as not making it obvious he was thinking about it.

  
"And third, you're an assassin. Assassins want to get paid." Raiden swept a hand down his body, drawing attention to his cybernetics. "I'm a veteran and former chief operator in one of the largest and most famous PMC groups in America, with a body worth more than most people's houses. I'm sure I can afford to pay you."

  
Travis reached the end of his set, at that moment. That was entirely the explanation for why he decided to stop. "A hundred thousand LB dollars," he said, as he reached for a towel. "And if this turns out to be some kind of trick, I'll sell your body for scrap, and make my money that way."

  
"A hundred thousand?" Raiden thought for a second, prompting his AR display to bring up a conversion calculator for US dollars to... he had never heard of LB dollars, before. How far gone was Santa Destroy, compared to the rest of the country?  
A number appeared, on screen. Raiden let out a sudden, breathy chuckle at how small it was.

  
"What?" said Travis. "What's so funny?"

  
"Oh, nothing," Raiden lied. "Nothing at all. A hundred thousand, you said? Deal."

  
Travis might have suspected something, but he was honestly too wrapped up in how perfect the deal seemed to be. A hundred thousand would give him enough money to pay the UAA and get number forty-eight's identity. And, if things turned out bad, he could always fight a cyborg. And win, this time. He held out a hand, smiling wolfishly and sarcastically drawling "So, what can I do for you, boss?"

  
Raiden reached out and shook the proffered hand. "Right. First things first: I have a partner who went missing, on their way to Santa Destroy. The last contact I had with him, he was passing through one of the Akashic Points."

  
Travis nodded. "So, that's what you were doing, at the junior high school, then?"

  
"His name is Bladewolf. He's an experimental LQ-84i prototype android."

  
Travis pursed his lips, trying not to make it too obvious that he thought the idea of an android named Bladewolf actually sounded pretty badass. "So, what?" he asked, instead. "You want me to go out, looking for this guy?"

  
"There's two Akashic Points, left," Raiden explained. "If you take one, and I take one, we can cover the both of them, and hopefully find Bladewolf."

  
Travis hadn't yet been to any of the Akashic Points, and he knew from experience that assassins tended to hide out, there. This deal he was making was starting to get better and better; not only would he make enough to reach his next ranked fight, but he might just be able to hop up in rankings, besides. "Do you actually know where these points are?" he asked. "I'm just saying, they tend to move around, and everyone and their grandma wants to claim they've got one, to give their store a bit of a boost in sales."

  
"Leave that to me," Raiden said, tapping his ear meaningfully. "Like I said, I've got some of the best intel gathering in the country, on my side."

  
"Fine, then." Travis stretched the kinks out of his arms. "Then in that case, it looks like I'm going... to..."

  
Raiden followed Travis's gaze, as it wandered off to the side. There, the cyborg saw the young lady from before, hiding inexpertly behind a speed bag. She met their gaze with the same intensity, as before, before finally opening her mouth. "Are... are you finished with your workout, Mister Touchdown, sir?"

  
"Looks like it," Travis replied. "Good job, keeping the place together. It looks exactly like I remembered it."

  
"Are you sure you have to go?" she asked, her voice quavering with... Raiden just wanted to call it "nervousness," and leave it at that. "Are you sure you don't want to... to..." Her pupils disappeared, beneath the mask of fog that clouded her glasses' lenses. "... _h-hit the showers?!_ "

  
Raiden and Travis exchanged glances, before the latter shrugged his shoulders and said. "No time for that, I'm afraid. Duty calls."

  
"Oh, I see." Viola reached up to carefully remove her glasses, clearing them with a soft cloth. "Well, remember that hygiene is important, especially when you're dealing with... with sweat and... and, um..." Her dress followed the back and forth motion of her thighs, as she tried valiantly to banish the image, that formed in her head. "Maybe next time, Mister Touchdown. We spent a great deal of time and money renovating the shower room, and the changing area.

  
 _And less money,_ Raiden thought, _on improving the equipment._

  
Slowly, with an awkwardness borne of one who has no idea of how to end a conversation, Viola shrunk away into the familiar safety of the hallway, into her office. Not once, not even for a millisecond, did she break eye contact, walking backwards in a way that seemed specially designed to keep her thighs in contact with each other. Her feet were the first thing to disappear out of sight, followed by her legs, then half her upper body, until she was little more than a possessively gripping hand and a single, wide eye against the wall.

  
Travis, in what Raiden could only describe as incredible bravado, turned his back to the woman and dedicated all his attention to him. "Right," he said. "So, where am I headed?"

  
Raiden reached into his tactical pouch, producing a small earpiece, and holding it out at the assassin. "Take this," he said. "It's an external Codec device, used to patch civilians into proprietary frequencies."

  
"Codec?" Travis grabbed the device and rolled it over, in his fingers. "So, what? We talking some kind of spy radio?"

  
"Something like that," said Raiden. "It's got an effective range of about ten miles from the transponder, located in my body, and can run for about eight hours on a full charge." On a sudden notion, Raiden decided now would be a good time to subtly probe the assassin for information. "Of course," he added, "you can get a bit more mileage out of it, if you patch it into your internal nanomachines."

  
"Whattamachines?" Travis scoffed. "Sorry to burst your bubble, old man, but I don't go for that shitty spec-ops stuff. All's I need is a beam katana and a good fight, and I'm set."

  
Raiden tried not to let his disappointment show. Not because he believed that Travis was completely unaugmented, but because the assassin was clearly onto him, and wasn't going to give up the game, that easily. He shrugged. "Suit yourself. The Codec should work, either way, provided you don't think to take it outside the city limits. I'll write down the frequency for my associate, who will get you up to speed."

  
They continued to make their plans and get their necessary info, strategically unaware of the woman down the hall, trying with all her might to undress the both of them with her mind.


	15. Chapter 15

**Chapter Fifteen**  
Quartet of Fragrant Maidens

  
Travis pulled one leg over and hopped off the Schpeltiger. "So," he muttered, to the piece of plastic sticking in his ear, "this is the spot?"

  
"This is the spot," Kevin's voice affirmed, in the small bones of his ear. "The Santa Destroy Convention Center. Used to be a good spot to get your hands on cheap second hand tech or the occasional bit of foreign merch. After the UAA really picked up, though, this place turned into just another venue for..."

  
"Listen," Travis interrupted. "I really don't need to know the history of this place. I've lived here, my whole life. I know all about the convention center."

  
"Oh." There was a note, in Kevin's voice, that hinted he was genuinely deflated, at the thought. "Right. My bad. It's just... I'm used to folks asking me for a detailed workup of a place, just so we all know what we're getting into. I got, like, six pages of notes, here."

  
"Well, that's not how things are done, around here," Travis replied. "Around here, all we need to know is where to go, and who to fight. Speaking of which, you got any leads on who's supposed to be hiding out, here?"

  
"Sorry, man. Best I could do was comb through the local gossip and figure out the stories that weren't put out there by angsty teenagers with vampire fetishes. The UAA's ranking system is a bit beyond me, at the moment."

  
Travis shook his head. "So much for the information network. Fine, whatever." Reaching to his belt loop, he pulled out the handle to his beam katana and pressed the button, releasing a humming line of green energy. "Time for me to finally start climbing up the ranks, on my own initiative."

  
"Uh, Travis?" Kevin interjected. "Remember that we're paying you to look for Bladewolf, all right?"

  
"Huh?" Travis waved the voice in his ear away, distractedly. "Yeah, yeah, right. Bladewolf. Of course." As he walked up to the door, a split second before his foot came down to kick it in, he muttered "I can do both."

  
"Wait, what?" Kevin rattled, though he was drowned out by the sound of the steel door swinging directly onto the concrete wall.

  
When Travis stepped through the threshold, something about the air around him changed. It seemed to grow colder, more stagnant. Suddenly, it was the dead of night, outside, and very little in the way of light came to him, save a single strip of illumination stretching out before him, showing him worn out carpets and stands with various flavors of Katakana on them, the remnants of some long forgotten anime convention.

  
A sound came to his ears, soft and insistent. The sound of young girls giggling, as if having just heard some scandalous bit of gossip. Travis raised an eyebrow; something about that sound was patently familiar to him. He felt as though he would recognize that particular group of girls, even as far away as they sounded.

  
Faintly aware that he might be walking into an ambush (not that such a thing ever really bothered to stop him, before), Travis began to walk along the illuminated path, set out before him. As big as he knew the place to be, from the many visits he had here, on his quest for rare anime merch, having his field of vision narrowed somewhat felt claustrophobic, as though he was being purposefully penned in to a small area.

  
Again, the laughter of young women floated to his ears. The sound was nostalgic, for reasons Travis couldn't place. It reminded him of long, lonely summer nights, with a broken air conditioner and an excessive amount of cheap microbrew. Nights spent in the glow of a cheap television set, in custom anime pajamas and painfully tight custom anime briefs. The summer of 2017 wasn't all that bad, actually.

  
He wasn't sure when, in his fond remembrances, he had started running, but by the time he was aware of it, Travis was going at nearly a full sprint. He did not remember there being this much real estate, in the convention center's main floor, but then, he was smack dab in the middle of an Akashic Point, so he took that in stride. He also took it in stride when a half dozen assassins, hanging off of wires, began to fly in his direction.

  
Travis swung left, then right, cutting two people down who tried to rush him, to the ground, without doing anything as barbaric as actually damaging the cord holding them. The others got close, but with his full-bodied swings Travis couldn't reach them, before they pulled back away and started to disappear into the darkness. About eight different assassins wheeled into the light, also on strings, winding left and right as they closed the gap. One of them pulled out some goofy looking gun, that looked more like a blowdryer, and loosed a line of glowing blue orb-shaped plasma bolts. Despite the fact that Travis was running towards them, however, they were incredibly slow; he needed only change his tack slightly to the left to bypass them.

  
None of the rest did anything noteworthy to defend themselves, which proved tragic when Travis was able to swing his sword in the opposite direction of their winding path, cutting through each of them, one by one. His victory was short lived, however, as a pair of assassins swooped in from behind them, spraying bullets as they crossed paths. Travis ducked underneath them, feeling the heat as they skimmed overhead. Another assailant popped in, spinning on his tether as he fired diagonally up right, and left, creating an "X" shape formed entirely of hot plasma. Travis slowed down long enough to watch the bullets scatter, a bit, before awkwardly slipping his way into the tiny gap formed between them.

  
The living assassins slipped away, as a man melted out of the shadows, his arms raised dramatically as he hovered in front of Travis. "Not bad," the man said, "for a novice."

  
"Novice?" Travis scoffed. "Did you see the touch I got on that? I've dodged harder bullet patterns in JRPGs."

  
The floating man, who for reasons known only to him was dressed in a manner reminiscent of a Shinto monk, scoffed right back. "Fool! Do you know who I am? You stand before the North American high score holder for _Bizarre Jerry: Fantastiku no Sparkuru Adventure._ I am the ultimate fanboy!"

  
"Oh, yeah?" Travis sneered. "Well, I hate to break it to you, old man, but I beat that game last night, on Maniac difficulty. Perfect run, no bombs."

  
"Liar!" The man pulled out a paper talisman, waving it in front of Travis as though it were the holy symbol of a faith he was woefully inexpert on. "If you managed to do that, then you should know exactly what song plays during the final cutscene."

  
"It's _Mad Jelly_ ," Travis bit back, "which is an unintentional design oversight, since the developers wrote the code wrong, in the initial batch, causing the cartridge to load the wrong sound file." His sneer deepened. "And I bet now, you're going to grill me about the post-credits Easter egg, too, aren't you?"

  
The man reared back, as if to throw his talisman, but he stopped, confused. "Wait. Easter egg? What Easter egg?"

  
Travis was surprised, but quickly worked his way up to haughtiness, without a second thought. "What? You're telling me you didn't know about the Easter egg? The one where you put in a button sequence on the Game Over screen? A and B in rapid succession, in a way that spells out Strawberry's measurements in binary. Surely the so-called 'ultimate fanboy' would know all about it."

  
It was clear, by the sheer indignation on the man's face, that he hadn't heard of this thing. However, in perfectly predictable fashion, he folded his arms and huffed. "O-of course I have!" he lied. "I was simply testing you! I know all about putting in Strawberry's measurements to get a bonus!"

  
"Well, good," Travis chuckled. "Because I was lying."

  
"What?"

  
"They're actually supposed to be _Nutberry's_ measurements."

  
"Enough talk!" The man shouted, with an authority that clearly wasn't trying to mask any kind of outrage or humiliation, on his part. "Prepare yourself for the power of Stanley Bell, ultimate Bizarre Jerry expert." A magical warding sigil began to glow ominously behind him, as if that meant something, and wasn't just there to look cool. "You want some bullet patterns? I'll give you all the bullet patterns you could ever want."

  
"Wait a minute," Travis said. "Don't I get some kind of gun? Or at least bombs? How am I supposed to hit you, if you keep flying away?"

  
Stanley chuckled deeply, as he pulled out a second talisman and made a pose that might have been a passable imitation of something out of a Buddhist text, if you squinted and also knew next to nothing about Buddhist artwork, and also completely ignored the fact that he was probably supposed to be Shinto, which is a completely different relig...you know what? Fuck it. You get the point, by now. Anyway, he said "I'm sure you'll figure something out, if you're as good as you seem to think you are."

  
As much as he knew this was probably bullshit, Travis also knew he really didn't have a lot of room to argue the point. Nor did he had the luxury of questioning why he still felt compelled to run in an endless straight line, playing directly to his opponent's strengths. This was just something that was happening, he decided, and he was just going to play along with it.

  
"Heavenly Seal!" Stanley cried, twisting his arms around as the seal behind him glowed brighter. "Tenebrous Star of Justice!"

  
The air around Stanley became a riot of colors, as bolts of rainbow energy flew up around him, then exploded in a vibrant mass of little laser bits. Travis slowed down again, squinting to try and find the opening amidst the glaring lights. Somehow, it was harder to do it from the ground, than it was from the bird's eye, third-person view he was accustomed to, but find it he did, scooting just the slightest bit to the left and right to work through the overlapping waves of energy blasts. He juked to the left, found a slightly safer spot to work in, felt the heat as bullet after bullet grazed past his cheek, his leg, his arm...

  
And then he felt something click, as though the tension was just waiting to get to a high enough point to push a button, in the back of his head. Travis always thought of this as being like watching a slot machine. He didn't know why. It wasn't like he was a gambler, or anything like that. Travis could see it, however, as if they were flashing off of the inside of his shades: a trio of pixelated bells.

  
"Blueberry Cheese Brownie!" were the words that spilled out of Travis's mouth, for reasons known only to him. Swinging his beam katana, he watched the look of mild surprise on Stanley's face as a bright blue arc of energy followed it, flying towards the assassin as a large crescent of power. Still sidestepping lasers, Travis began swinging maniacally, sending wave after wave at Stanley. The latter did nothing to dodge, instead letting them crash against his magical sigil, one after another.

  
Suddenly, the bullets all stopped. The sigil shattered, like fine china after a violent barrage of phantom beam katana swipes. Travis decided not to hint that he was glad the spell broke, right before he ran out of steam and couldn't do the katana lasers, anymore. Instead, he took advantage of the sudden lack of lasery death and rushed, swinging his sword as fast as his already worn out arms could allow.

  
"Ha!" Stanley brayed, as the sword passed harmlessly through his body, over and over. "You fool! Don't you know I'm the master of _danmaku?_ Swing at me all you want, but you'll never hit me. I've managed to shrink my hitbox to the size of a single pixel! The chances of you finding it are a million to on-"

  
He would have kept on taunting, but Travis just so happened to nick his hitbox, at that moment.

  
Stanley flew backwards and exploded in a violent burst of light. Just like that, the room was dark and silent.

  
Travis scoffed. "And here I was, hoping this would be a better fight." He turned around in the direction of the door. Or, at least, he wanted to. His brain told his feet to turn around. His feet, however, seemed to still be preoccupied with running in a straight line. "Huh," he grunted, looking up into the void. "Bell? Do you have extra lives, or something?"

  
A sound floated to his ears, once again. The sound of laughter.

  
 _"Oh, dear,"_ said a young, impossibly saccharine voice, in the kind of Japanese one normally hears in morally questionable erotica, _"Bell-sama has been defeated."_

  
 _"Poor Bell-sama,"_ a second voice chimed in, slightly brassier but no less impossibly innocent sounding. _"I guess this means the tiger-man is a bad guy, huh?"_

  
 _"Can we fight him?"_ said a third voice, softly and meekly. _"If he beat Bell-kun so easily..."_

  
 _"Idiot!"_ the first voice shouted, followed by the sound of paper smacking against head. _"Why do you take such a familiar tone with him?"_

  
_"Ee-yaaah! I'm sorry, Strawberry-chan! It's not what it sounds like!"_

  
Travis stared at the void, with a raised eyebrow. "Hey, um, can I maybe get some subtitles, over here?"

  
 _"Hey, Strawberry-chan,"_ the second voice said. _"I think the assassin is trying to talk to us. I can't tell; Bell-sama never taught us to speak English."_

  
The girl, who's name was apparently Strawberry, wasn't interested. Instead, judging by the wavering cry of the third girl, she seemed to be occupied with shaking her as she continued to chew her out, for having the audacity to use an intimate modifier on Stanley's name.

  
 _"Should I talk to him?"_ A fourth voice-which for some reason seemed to belong to a woman approximately ten years older, piped up.

  
"Yeah," Travis shouted, "see, I was going to learn Japanese, one of these days, but I've been so busy. I usually watch my anime sub-only. I know a few words, like 'big brother' and 'no, don't put that there...'"

  
 _"Of course!"_ the second voice exclaimed. _"It's a good thing you were captain of the English After School Club. Do your best, Nutberry-chan."_

  
 _"Yes!"_ A woman slowly materialized out of the darkness, a blue haired woman who looked way younger than both her voice and her excessively large breasts might suggest. She cleared her throat. "Good morning, assassin-san. Is a good day for drying laundry, I think."

  
Travis's jaw dropped. "Wait a minute. You're... you're Nutberry, right? Does that mean that...?"

  
The lights seemed to brighten, revealing a trio of forms further up. A dark-skinned, blue haired lady, dressed like a witch (in that she had a pointed hat, that is; nothing else about her tiny shorts, tiny shirt, garter belt, stockings and boots, would suggest she was anything of the sort) sat in the air, patiently staring at the assassin. Off to the side, a similarly dressed redhead in pigtails and a cape was busy shaking a blonde back and forth, with enough force to no doubt give the girl whiplash several times over.

  
When it was obvious by Travis's wide-eyed, slightly predatory stare that they were visible, the witch and the redhead gave him a greeting involving the victory sign and a coquetteish wink.

  
The blonde pulled up a victory sign a few seconds later, staring up at the ceiling senselessly as she did so.


	16. Chapter 16

**Chapter Sixteen**   
_A Stranger on the Moon_

  
The Hideous Freight Company was, by all accounts, a terrible place to work. One might naturally think it had mostly to do with the fact that, for reasons unknown to virtually anyone, it became an Akashic Point and was filled to the brim with spooky ghosts and demons and crap. They would be right. Almost entirely. Hideous Freight was a lovely place to work, until a bunch of spooky ghosts started running around, killing everyone.

  
It was late in the day, when Raiden slipped through the front door. Everyone had knocked off of work early, after Walter was found in the bathroom with fifty stab wounds. He snuck from cubicle to cubicle, gun drawn, checking each for signs of things that might try to do the same, to him. He didn't find any, though in one he did find that the occupant was starting to fill out their resume. Good for him, he thought to himself.

  
The chime of his Codec pulled him from admiring the sight of someone, in this day and age, having the spine to risk the job market and try and work their way up, in life. Raiden situated himself against a cubicle wall and pressed a finger to his earlobe. The null entry appeared in his AR display, happily gurgling away in his ear.

  
"Hey, cut the man some slack," Raiden replied. "The job market has been terrible for a long time. Especially now that cyborgs are starting to gain public acceptance."

  
Raiden carefully rounded the corner and resumed his sweep of the offices, as the null entry began choking, in great detail, about the virtues of hard work and the realities of making a living in an increasingly more mechanized age.

  
Raiden chuckled. "You know, you sound like an old man, talking like that. Weren't you in your thirties, when you died?"

  
The null entry chuckled back. At least, that was the most reasonable interpretation of the harsh, grating series of pained exhalations that made their way to the cyborg's ear. It then continued its commentary on society and life, as Raiden moved from the offices to the hallway into the loading dock.

  
"That may be so," said Raiden, "but there's really no discounting the fact that cybernetics present a categorical advantage, in nearly every job market. Increased muscle performance and endurance, chemical regulation of brain function and stability, enhanced senses... you give those to someone with a good work ethic, and they couldn't help but be a valuable employee."

  
The null entry scoffed, before biting back with an especially uncomfortable idea.

  
"What?" Raiden knitted his brow. "No, I guess cybernetic enhancements aren't a luxury everyone has access to. That would probably exacerbate the strain placed on people with disabilities, who otherwise couldn't afford them."

  
There was an awkward pause, as he stepped through the staff-only door leading to the loading dock. One might think it was because he was trying, and failing, to find a way to work around the problem that an enhanced work force presented to the overwhelming majority of the population who couldn't afford or go through with the expensive, invasive process of cybernetic surgery. They would be right. Raiden, like a great many rich people, suddenly found himself face to face with the problems faced by the poorer strata of society.

  
Also, it didn't help that there was a spooky ghost, standing in the middle of the empty loading dock.

  
"I'm going to have to call you back," Raiden said, as he hung up on the null entry. Removing his finger from his ear, he made his way down the stairs, slowly and cautiously.

  
The figure that stood in the middle of the dock had her back to Raiden. Like a lot of cyborgs, or indeed, anyone wearing a modern combat suit, the outline of her body was not in any way obscured, save for the large, bulky collar around her neck, that stretched down along her spine with a series of wide nodes, all along. Raiden, with his well-trained sense of situational awareness, was more interested in the device than he was the woman's shapely, well contoured butt. Yes. He was. Honestly. He was also more aware of the woman's bright-red hair and impossibly angled siletto heels, which made her robotic feet look as though they were en pointe constantly, like a ballerina, and supported by a sharp, knife like frame extending from the ankle.

  
"Mistral?" Raiden lowered his gun into the traditional safe stance. "Is that you?"

  
The woman turned around, in a motion that seemed specifically designed to be provocative beyond the limit of natural grace. Her full lips pulled up, at one corner, before she strangled out a greeting.

  
Raiden winced. "Right. I guess, after meeting Monsoon, I should have expected something like this to happen. How have you been holding up?"

  
Mistral advanced, as she spoke, crossing one leg in front of the other in a way that was entirely fake, and borderline impossible.

  
Raiden looked up, a half second after she had finished speaking, and said "Of course. Right. You're still dead, and everything. You're better off than Monsoon, actually. He got shot, earlier today."

  
Mistral motioned to Raiden's gun, choking out a response with a mixture of lusty sensuality and gently restrained animosity.

  
"No, not me," said Raiden. "It's a long story; my sword's in need of repairs, so..." He shook his head. "Never mind. This is a good thing, actually. I could use your help, finding Bladewolf."

  
Mistral folded her arms, her smirk widening.

  
"Er, yeah," Raiden continued, with a hint of nervousness. "You and he have history, right? You used to be his handler, and everything. He was passing through an Akashic Point, a while ago, and I lost contact, so I was hoping you would be able to help me track him down."

  
Mistral made a noise. Judging by the way she threw her head back, it was obvious it was supposed to be a laugh.

  
Raiden laughed back, in an attempt to seem in good humor. Once the full implication of the situation popped into his head, however, his laugh faltered, and his expression fell. "I mean..." he ventured, hopefully, "...you're not still mad at me, are you? For the business at Abkhazia? I mean, we were soldiers, right? We met on the battlefield. It wasn't anything personal."

  
Mistral glared at the other cyborg. A faint glow came off of her, purple and menacing.

  
Raiden took a half step backwards. "This is about what I did to Senator Armstrong, isn't it?"

  
Suddenly, he was aware of a weight on his shoulders. Then, a weight on his legs, and his arm, and the other side of his shoulders. Before he really had a chance to react, he was weighed down with about a half dozen round metal shapes, each about the size of a beach ball. Grunting, he grabbed the first one by one of its three arms, pulling it off and tossing it aside with enough force to cause the rest of his clinger-ons to slip and stumble.

  
The next thing he felt was a sudden surge of electricity, as one of the other creatures activated its stun feature. Another one started its stun, while Raiden was still reeling from the first, and the third hit as he was still processing the second. The force was easily enough to pull him to his knees; the fourth and fifth shocks were clearly just there for the sake of thoroughness, sadism, or both.

  
Mistral made a motion as if to sit down on the air. A collection of robots, metallic orbs mounted on humanoid arms, locked themselves together behind her, in a way that allowed them to support her body in their outstretched hands. Folding one leg over the other, she rested her chin in her hand and watched the Dwarf Gekko doing their thing with obvious amusement. She gurgled something at Raiden.

  
The latter, who for his part was distracted with the repeated electric shocks, wasn't quite able to catch what was said over the crackling in his ears (and, really, the rest of him). "What did you say?"

  
Mistral frowned, clearing her throat with a purpose, as though there were something physical she could remove from it. "I said," she said, her voice suddenly clearer, "you need to be punished."

  
Raiden cried out, as a fresh barrage of electricity stormed through him. He rolled onto his back, trying to pull himself off of the mass of Dwarf Gekko, but to no avail.

  
"What are you doing, with that silly little gun?" Her glowing aura was more or less overpowering, as she stroked her cheek idly, with one finger. "Has the Ripper decided to relive his glory days in Liberia?"

  
Gritting his teeth, Raiden forced his arms to work, coming together over his pistol. He pulled the slide back, though he wasn't quite sure why.

  
"Or could it be," she continued to taunt, "that you've lost all of your precious swords? Silly boy; you really should take better care of your toys."

  
There was a burning, in his muscle fibers. The equivalent of his veins. He couldn't quite identify it, and it was hard to pinpoint, over the burn of electricity, but...

  
"I heard about what you did to Blackburn, you know. She was just a little girl, however. You know as well as I do that small arms are not going to cut it, against a cyborg like me."

  
His thumb slid over the opening, into the gun chamber. Why did it feel like he was... loading something into the chamber?

  
"Of course, it's not like it matters, anyway." Mistral began to laugh. "Even if you had a sword, you couldn't do anything, squirming around on the floor, like that."

  
"Actually," Raiden replied, his voice harsher and more hoarse, than usual, "if you call off your goon squad, I can show you exactly what I can do, from the floor."

  
Mistral laughed. Notably, the tone changed significantly, as if she found something about that threat actually, genuinely funny, as opposed to the laughter she had been engaging in before, on the heels of Raiden's pain and suffering. "I am half tempted to call your little bluff." She extended her free hand and snapped her fingers. The Dwarf Gekko around Raiden ceased their assault, at that exact moment, as she resumed her taunting. "Go on, then, Jack. Show me what you can do, from where you're laying."

  
Raiden looked up, staring upside-down at Mistral. He carefully pulled his arm up, around the Dwarf Gekko that still clung to his body, and pointed his gun directly at her chest. "For starters," he said, a note of sardonic antagonism finding its way into his voice, "I could always do this."

  
"I heard that Electroconvulsive Therapy causes memory loss, Jack, but I didn't think you'd forget something I said one minute ago." Slowly, aided by the nervous shuffling of a dozen robotic hands, Mistral swung herself around so that she was lying on her stomach, head in her hands and pointed directly at the barrel of Raiden's gun. "The worst you could do with a pea shooter like that is scratch my face."

  
"Normally, yes." Raiden had no idea where this confidence was coming from, or how he knew the things that were going through his head, but he ran with it, on the off chance that he might actually figure out what he was mouthing off, about. "But this gun is special. I loaded it with some special ammunition."

  
"Special ammunition?" Mistral was clearly unconvinced. "Look at the caliber of that dinky little thing. What could you possibly have put in there that would even come close to..."

  
The expression, volume, and confidence of the lady cyborg all began to fall, quickly. It started off as something to ignore, a trick of the light. But as she spoke, it became obvious that the trick was primarily that the light in question was coming from inside the barrel of the gun.

  
"To be honest, I'm not a hundred percent sure," Raiden confessed, grinning wolfishly. "I only just learned about this thing. If I had to give this bullet a name, I think I'd call it..." He pulled the trigger, loosing a blinding, glowing bolt of energy directly at Mistral's face. "...Collateral Shot!"

  
The resulting explosion of energy was blinding, deafening, and quite possibly muting, as well (though it was hard to tell, given the aforementioned deafening, going on). Eventually, the sound of popping reached his ears, as the Dwarf Gekko around him broke apart into that strange foam, from before. He could only assume that Mistral, who received the absolute bulk of his new technique, was also part of the cloud of foam that shrunk and receded, into the shadows. More importantly, she wasn't around, and neither were the robots that had been keeping him pinned to the ground, and so he took this as a fine opportunity to get to his feet.

  
Raiden set his jaw, crooking an arm up to rest his gun against his shoulder, as though it was somehow much heavier than its appearance would suggest, and needed the support. "How's that?" he called, to the slowly reforming, multi-colored spheres. "Not bad, for a pea-shooter, huh?"

  
When the foam congealed back together, forming once again into the shape of Mistral, she was noticeably different. Her large collar thing was gone, her hair was slightly darker, she had raised herself up a few inches, mostly in the arms and legs. Also, her outfit had been completely supplanted by the matte black arms of Dwarf Gekko, covering her body like bizarre cords in a way that gave her... well, it preserved her modesty, in the most direct sense of the phrase, and only as long as you ignored the fact that her modesty was being preserved by a series of groping artificial hands. Resting behind her back was her old familiar weapon: a set of Gekko arms, interlocked and holding hands to form a straight line, with a knife gripped by the hand at either end.

  
"What is it with these Akashic Points," Raiden gruffed, his voice harsh and gravelly, "and their propensity to make people look more ridiculous, whenever I shoot them?"

  
"What is it with your Ripper persona," Mistral bit back, "and it's propensity to make you sound like you caught a sudden sore throat?"

  
Raiden cracked up, in that way people do, when they're actually really offended, and are just trying to downplay it. "Get your laughs in now, Mistral. I killed you, before. Changing your pajamas isn't going to stop me from doing it, again."

  
If Mistral found herself in any way threatened by the emergence of Jack the Ripper, she was doing an absolutely fantastic job of hiding it. "Oh, I think it's safe to say _neither_ of us are the people we were, in Abkhazia. Tell me, how many of those special bullets do you have left?" Raiden's expression, apparently, told her more than he had really intended to. "Do you even know if you can pull that off, a second time?"

  
Raiden managed to recover, at least in his own head. "Perhaps you'd like to find out," he bluffed.

  
Mistral whipped her arm down, causing her weapon to curl up, straighten out, and slap the ground with a violent crack. "I'm done playing around with you, Jack. Now I'm going to disassemble you, piece by piece."

  
His bluff failed, but for the most part Raiden wasn't fazed. He wasn't really lying in order to get Mistral to back off, or even to convince her to hesitate. After all, that would be something Jack might do. Not the Ripper. The Ripper wanted a fight, and judging by the look in Mistral's eyes, he was about to get what he wanted, in spades.

  
There was the matter of his equipment, mind you. That was proving to be inconvenient. Even more inconvenient was the fact that he apparently had until she could close the gap between them, to figure out how to remedy that situation. He did have one thing, that was slightly more effective than a standard Mark 22 pistol, but... oh, just the thought of that silly little thing was enough to make him roll his eyes in contempt, and right at a time when his eyes should be doing anything but rolling around.

  
However, Mistral was in the air, now, ready to come down on him with her razor sharp polearm, so it seemed as though he had little choice. Reluctantly, but with a speed borne of cybernetic reflexes, Raiden reached into his tactical pouch.


	17. Chapter 17

**Chapter Seventeen**   
_They Were Literally All Doctor Sheppard?_

  
"This is incredible!" Travis exclaimed. "This is... you guys aren't cosplayers, are you? You're like the honest-to-God Bizarre Jelly crew."

  
"You are very kind, Assassin-san," Nutberry replied, in stilted English. "My name is..."

  
"I know your name," Travis interrupted. "I know all your names. Nutberry, Strawberry, Blueberry, Cranberry..."

  
"I think I need to go to the school nurse, Strawberry-chan," Cranberry whined, from her perch, hanging from the red-head's hands. Strawberry paid her no mind.

  
"Hey, wait a minute," Travis cocked an eyebrow, as he looked around. "What about Gooseberry? You can't have a party without the head of the School Festival Planning Committee."

  
There was no answer, to that one. The girls, even the ones who only spoke Japanese, needed only hear the word "Gooseberry" to be rendered completely silent. Nutberry smiled, nervously, as she tried to remain polite. Blueberry curled inward, gripping her elbow in her other hand and taking a keen interest in the floor. Strawberry closed her eyes, muttering a curse under her breath against every single gaijin. Cranberry placed a finger under the bridge of her nose, convinced that she was bleeding, but grateful that it turned out that she wasn't.

  
"Oh." There were any number of reasons for the sudden, pregnant pause in the room, each one more beastly than the last. It was probably best, he decided, not to entertain those reasons, if only because it invariably conjured up flashbacks to some of the things Travis watched during his many, many forays into the world of sketchy Japanese animation, which was not exactly a state of mind that he found worked really well, when he was running around the real world.

  
"Um, Mister Assassin-san?" Nutberry finally piped up. "Are we going to do the fighting?"

  
"What?" Travis blinked. "Uh, well, to be honest, I thought the reason I was still running around was because the guy I was fighting was going to come back. I didn't really think I was going to even meet you girls, let alone..."

  
 _"Hey, hey!"_ Blueberry called out, folding her hands over her head and leaning back in a lackadaisical fashion that in no way served to accentuate her possibly underage body. _"Can we shoot him, yet? I'm getting tired of floating around, and I kind of got a date to worry about, later."_

 

 _"Ehhhh?"_ Cranberry pulled her head up, at that, blushing furiously. _"R-really? I didn't think you'd be into things like that."_

  
Blueberry pursed her lips, staring up at the ceiling, as her cheeks took on a slightly more subdued shade of red. _"Idiot. When you say it like that, you make it sound so dirty."_

  
Strawberry released her grip on her friend, sliding over and giving Blueberry an amiable poke in the ribs with her elbow. _"Don't welch on us now, Blueberry-chan. Who's the lucky boy?"_

  
Blueberry clenched her fist and spun to face the red-head, as she shouted _"M-mind your own business!"_

  
Travis could only watch, his eyes widening and his mouth going slack, at the scene unfolding before him. Strawberry began to hover around Blueberry, needling and prodding her for information. Cranberry, for her part, clung to the blue-haired girl's arm, tears in her eyes as she lamented the fact that one of her best friends was going to be leaving the group to go find true love. Blueberry, meanwhile, was having absolutely none of this, but her ability to hit Strawberry with her special lasers was being hindered, greatly, by the bleeding heart clinging to her body and weighing herself down, so all she could do was flail about ineffectually.

  
 _"Oh, my..."_ Nutberry tried to get the attention of the other girls. _"Please, don't fight. Come on, everyone. How are we supposed to avenge Bell-sama like this?"_

  
Travis's mouth quirked up into a smile. It was not, as one has probably come to expect from his characterization in this particular fanfiction, a smile borne of schadenfreude or the anticipation of a good fight, or an attempt to mask the frustrations of a man who lived a life of frustrations, overwhelmingly of his own making. It was... lighter. Purer. A spark of sheer, joyful rapture danced behind his eyes, like an ember slowly giving light to a warm, bright fire. Had he been standing normally, without a beam katana occupying them, he would have had to entertain the urge to put his hands over his mouth, in an instinctive effort to preserve some kind of dignity. He wouldn't have to fight the urge, mind you, because such an urge would have been the milieu of a man who cared about his dignity. At that moment in time, he did not care a single iota about anything, like that.

  
Nutberry, being the only one not currently engaged in an incongruously bubbly fight, was the first to notice the change in Travis's overall demeanor. She leaned over, to try and meet the man's gaze. _"Um, Assassin-san?"_ She squinted. _"Your pupils have gotten really big, like Bell-sama's."_

  
Travis's mouth finally began to work, somewhat. He was able to close his lips, anyway. When he opened them again, there was only one word that could find its way out, whispered with an intensity bordering on religious devotion: "Moe...!"

  
Everything stopped, at that. Blueberry, who by that point had gotten Strawberry in a headlock with her one usable arm, slackened her grip. Not that it mattered, because Strawberry stopped trying to struggle out. Cranberry even managed to quiet down, barring the odd hiccup and sniffle. Nutberry took a cautious stance, as she floated out of arm's reach. Every one of the girls turned their attention squarely to the man running after them.

  
 _"Did..."_ Blueberry stuttered, _"...did he just say...?"_

  
 _"Yeah."_ Strawberry scowled, as she slipped out of Blueberry's grip. _"He did."_

  
 _"He sounded just like Bell-kun, when he said that,"_ Cranberry remarked.

  
Strawberry didn't seem to notice Cranberry's lapse, this time. Instead, she clenched her fists and said _"It's happening, again."_

  
Nutberry tried to put herself in between Strawberry and Travis. _"Now, hold on, Strawberry-chan. Let's not do anything hasty. Just because he said..."_

  
 _"Idiot!"_ The redhead lifted a fist in Nutberry's direction, menacingly. _"Do you think I'm going to take that risk? After what that monster did to Gooseberry?!"_

  
"What are you saying, Strawberry-chan?" Travis called. "I already said I don't speak Japanese, that well."

  
 _"Strawberry-chan,"_ said Cranberry. _"You're being really serious. Are you sure you want to go through with this?"_

  
 _"She's right,"_ Blueberry chimed in. _"We've been dealing with otaku for so long, we've started to forget that this isn't normal. This life we've been living... it's not the life of a first-year high school student, and it hasn't been for twenty years!"_

  
Strawberry nodded, defiantly. _"It's time to say enough! All these years of being fawned over, all these years of young men pretending to be our boyfriends..."_

  
 _"...all these years of wondering whether somebody's gone through our unmentionables drawers..."_ Blueberry added.

  
Cranberry tapped her index fingers together, nervously. _"...all these years of people staring at us, in our costumes, and making weird breathing noises..."_

 

Nutberry was determined to be the voice of reason, but upon being reminded of the state of her life, even she was unable to resist adding _"...all these years of being written as the sexually dominant partner in terrible erotic fanfiction..."_

  
"Woah!" Travis perked up. "I think I caught a few words, on that last one."

  
 _"Girls...!"_ Strawberry pointed to Travis, with all the pomp and circumstance of a woman declaring a death sentence. _"...it's time to do what we should have done, a long time ago. For Gooseberry!"_

  
"For Gooseberry!" went the battle cry. The four girls took up positions, fanning out in a semi-circle around the front of the assassin, as they called up the pieces of Glastonbury that formed their unique battle suits. Of course, as could be expected of girls bound to the source material that they were, such "suits" were really little more than a rig that hung around their hips, and covered their forearms, while doing very little to otherwise increase the amount of covered skin or really do anything but draw more attention to the fact that their parents, had they existed, would have nothing but objections to the way they were dressed, in public.

  
Travis, completely oblivious to the situation unfolding, around him, could only cackle in excitement. "Awesome!" he cried. "You even have the Glastonbury suits! They look so much cooler in person!"

  
He started to get a hint or two, when he noticed them getting into formation, around him. Some part of him didn't want to think that was what it was; it was much more reasonable, at that point in time, for him to think they were just putting themselves in the best position to show off their sweet suits. The potential uncertainty was enough, however, to make him the slightest bit wary.

  
"Uh, hey, ladies?" He chuckled, uneasily. "What, uh... what's up? Looks like you're about to drop a danmaku or someth..."

  
Strawberry was the first to fire, loosing a stream of red, arrow shaped bolts, one from each hand. Travis was spared by killer reflexes, pulling to the side even before his mind had registered that he was under attack. His eyes widened, when Blueberry decided to get into the mix, and he suddenly found himself criss-crossing through four streams, crossing directly where he was standing. Travis grit his teeth, as bolt after bolt grazed against his jacket, finding just the right pattern of zigs and zags to slip around their concentrated fire, without doing worse than making the fabric a bit toasty.

  
Which made it awfully inconvenient when Nutberry came up directly in front of him, throwing an energy blast the size of a large beach ball at his face.

  
His heart was hammering in his chest. To be honest, with all the cardio he had been getting up until now, his heart had been going pretty strong, for a while. This, however, was different. That... thing in the back of his mind clicked, once again. That thing that normally popped up, whenever he was at a point where the tension was fit to burst. He thought for a moment that he ought to stop, to fight it. Not here, he told himself. Not in front of these girls. But he couldn't help it. He couldn't hold it back, any more. One more graze slipped past his arm, and suddenly he was over the edge, and ready to blow.

  
With a force that could only be described as "needlessly violent," Travis's jacket and shirt blew off of his chest. His pants tightened. Like, his entire pair of pants. Mostly in the legs and butt region. His shoes became boots, his skin sprouted fake looking, painted on tiger stripes, and an ornate orange and black luchador mask seemed to just sort of appear on his face. When he swung his beam katana at the approaching energy bolt, the weapon had gone through a transformation, itself, becoming a brilliant shade of orange and crackling with errant bolts of runaway lightning. It sent every projectile in its path careening off in a dozen different directions, forcing the girls to pause their assaults to take evasive action.

  
Cranberry had made her way behind Travis, screaming at the top of her lungs as she sent wave after wave of energy at the assassin. Spinning around, and showing a natural talent for running backwards, Travis met her assaults with his sword, cutting the energy down the middle and forcing them to sail past him in chaotic "V" shapes. During one such swing, he seemed to put quite a bit of English on it, leaping into the air and bringing the sword down with both hands. This, as it turned out, was part of a gambit, of sorts. Plunging the katana down, into the carpet, he shifted his weight so he was balancing on the thin filament, in such a way that no doubt threatened to void the warranty.

  
He pushed off, taking to the air with impossible grace. Spinning, wheeling around, he stopped his mad ascent with his back to his assailants, slowing down for just long enough to lock eyes, with his chosen target, before somehow speeding back up again. By the time he came down over Cranberry, he was a whirling tornado of bright orange energy, aimed to bring the full force of his wrath square on the little girl's head.

  
Or at least, that's what would have happened, were it not for the fact that, at the last second, he just so happened to meet her wide, fearful gaze.

  
Pulling aside at the last second, Travis came down on the ground with enough force to buzzsaw a gash in the floor, as deep as his arm. He failed to stick the landing (as one often does, when they intend for their landing to be on top of one of their victims), tumbling to the ground and falling flat onto his stomach. His hyper mode transformation wore itself out, a half-second later, and when he struggled back up to one knee, he did so as his normally dressed self.

  
"Fuck!" He shut off his beam katana, tossing it to the side. "I can't do it. Killing women is bad enough, but to do it to you guys... it would betray the Moe Code."

  
The girls gathered themselves together. If they seemed in any way willing to relent, they gave no sign. Strawberry, especially, seemed nothing if not galvanized to hear that toxic word, again. She raised her hand, calling up a ball of energy, and her friends followed her example.

  
Travis shook his head. "Do what you gotta do, girls. You know I'll love you, either way." He tucked his knee back underneath himself and put his hands down, pressing his head to the ground in absolute submission, to what was about to occur.

  
There was a bright light, an electric hum of energy, a chaotic crashing noise and explosion, and then... silence.

  
Travis thought, for a moment, that he might have actually lucked out, and gotten a painless death. Then he heard Strawberry call out "W-what? How is that possible?"

  
When Travis looked up, he found he was looking into a mirror. Well, actually, no. A mirror was certainly ahead of him, but between him and that was a robotic dog, of some kind, a black and red affair with blocky armor, a strange tendril like tail, and a chainsaw on its back. It would, perhaps, be more accurate to say that when Travis looked up, he found he was looking at a robot dog ass, but that would hardly be dignified.

  
The round, ancient mirror floated up, setting itself on the dog's back with its old copper back facing up as flames danced along its rim. The robot dog turned around to look at Travis. "Are you wounded?" it asked, the red visor around its eyes glowing with every syllable.

  
Travis looked from the dog, to the girls, back to the dog, his jaw slack as he tried to figure out how to even respond.

  
"Civilians should retreat to a safe distance," the dog continued, when it was obvious that no answer was forthcoming. "I will deal with the threat."

  
"Wait!" Travis shouted. "You can't!"

  
The robot dog turned its head to face the girls. "I am a fully equipped, autonomous combat android. Threat management of this kind is within my parameters."

  
"Not that!" Travis pleaded. "The Code...!"

  
"I do not subscribe to your Code, civilian," the robot replied, as it hunkered down and prepared for a fight. "Furthermore, the word 'moe' does not appear in my databanks." Before Travis could begin to explain the Moe Code, or otherwise turn it away, the robot dog was loping off in pursuit of the Bizarre Jelly girls.


End file.
